Despite the Democrats being widely reported to have scored a 306 to 232 electoral college victory, President Donald Trump is not backing down on his claims the his challenger, Joe Biden “won because the election was rigged”.
With no official public engagements on Sunday, Trump was all over the social media launching a volley of tweets on the US Presidential election, which he has now made very ‘contentious’.
Early Sunday morning, he continued to cast a long shadow over Republican party’s defeat at the polls by tweeting about Joe Biden, saying: “He won”
However, this was not the formal concession of the US presidential election which he has refused to give, despite every major media organisation calling the race for Biden with an electoral college result of 306-232.
Coincidentally, this is the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result he insisted then was a landslide. Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3 million margin in the popular vote. Biden is more than 5 million votes up.
“He won because the election was rigged,” Trump wrote, before recycling a melange of the baseless claims of voter’s fraud.
Trump has continued to push this position, with his lawyers attempting to prove same in court in battleground states, with little to no chance of success, most election observers have posited.
Going by its practice, Twitter tagged the Trump tweet with a message: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
Also, NBC News reported an anonymous White House official as saying the tweet about how Biden won “may very well” represent the start of some sort of Trump’s concession moves.
But the President seemed to disagree with such perception, tweeting shortly afterwards: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
Mainstream experts and analysts agree that it was not. The presidential result in Georgia is subject to a recount – which Trump on Sunday called a “scam” – but it is not expected to slip from Biden’s column and the Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January.
On the surface, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat is affecting Biden’s preparations, with transition funds unreleased and national security briefings not given.
From Wilmington, Delaware, the President-elect continues to consider cabinet appointments and legislative priorities and to issue appeals to the country to take seriously the spiralling coronavirus pandemic.
On Saturday, as his ardent supporters gathered in Washington to back him and reject Biden, Trump went to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.
And having no public events on his Sunday schedule, he released volleys after volleys of tweets from the White House.
