President Trump declared himself the likely victor of the presidential election in an early Wednesday speech and vowed to go to the Supreme Court to stop Democrats from using “fraud” to help Joe Biden win.
“Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t stand for it,” Trump said, without evidence, in a speech from the White House East Room that began at 2:21 a.m.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity,” Trump said.
“We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, OK?”
“We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned, we already have.”
The president said, “we were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything, and all of a sudden that was just called off.”
Before speaking, the president tweeted, “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Both Twitter and Facebook flagged the claims.
Trump spoke after an unexpectedly strong Election Day showing that dashed Democratic hopes for a Biden landslide and debunked many polls.
The Trump-Biden race remains undecided across Midwest battlegrounds Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which broke narrowly for Trump in 2016, making him president.
A large number of mail-in ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic delayed results in the three states. In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court allowed mail-in ballots to arrive to election offices by Friday to be counted, even without legible postmarks.
An intense legal struggle is likely if Pennsylvania is pivotal to the national outcome and results are close, with Republicans arguing the state court erred. The US Supreme Court turned down a pre-election request to intervene.
“We’re winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount,” Trump contended in his early-morning speech. “Think of this: We’re up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania… with 64 percent of the vote in. It’s going to be almost impossible to catch. And we’re coming into good Pennsylvania areas where they happen to like your president, so we’ll probably expand that.”