Amid Democratic elation and the eruption of street dancing, champagne corks, and exclamations of joy over Saturday’s announcement that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election to become the next President of the United States, his opponent—President Donald Trump—issued a statement shortly after the news broke making clear there is likely no concession speech in sight as he made further unfounded claims over the election results and vowed further legal challenges.
While Trump had earlier announced his intention to hold an 11:30 am ET news conference, that event was scuttled, or at least postponed, when major news networks—which have been diligently tracking the counting of ballots since voting concluded on Tuesday—finally called the race in Biden’s favor at roughly the same time.
Despite Trump’s repeated and outrageously false public statements—starting on Election Night and carrying through to Saturday morning—that he “in fact” was the actual winner of the 2020 race, the sitting president showed no sense of irony, hypocrisy, or self-awareness at all as he accused Biden, who has repeatedly over the last four days urged for all the ballots to be counted and for the nation to be patient, of claiming his win prematurely.
“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” Trump declared in a bizarre written statement issued by his campaign after Biden’s win was projected.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” the statement continued. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor. In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process. Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.”
As of this writing, Trump has given no additional indication that he was preparing a concession that he might deliver to Biden or the nation, but that didn’t keep some detractors of the president from wondering what such a process—given his behavior thus far—might look like:
While it’s very much true as Trump states that media outlets do not get to decide who wins or loses an election, it has been Trump all week long making preposterous and lie-filled claims about the process. As Common Dreams reported earlier Saturday, the repeated false claims and assertion by the president have made clear that he is more interested in trying to either steal the election or sow chaos on his way out the door than actually engage in a fact-based assessment of where the vote count has been at any given point.