On Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted about Joe Biden.
“He won,” he wrote.
But it was not the formal concession of the US presidential election which Trump has refused to give, despite every major media organisation calling the race for Biden with an electoral college result of 306-232 – coincidentally the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result he insisted was a landslide.
Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3m in the popular vote. Biden is more than 5m up.
“He won because the election was rigged,” Trump wrote, before recycling a melange of the baseless claims of voter fraud he continues to push and which his lawyers are attempting to prove in court in battleground states – with little to no chance of success, according to most observers.
According to practice, Twitter tagged the Trump tweet with a message: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
According to NBC News, an anonymous White House official said the tweet about how Biden won “may very well” represent the start of some sort of Trump concession.
One Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, followed suit, telling NBC’s Meet the Press: “It was good actually to see President Trump tweet out that ‘he won’. I think that’s a start of an acknowledgment.”
But the president disagreed, tweeting: “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 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 Sunday Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Trump’s tweets had no bearing on the actuality of the election.
“Donald Trump’s Twitter feed doesn’t make Joe Biden president or not president,” Klain told NBC’s Meet the Press. “The American people did that.”
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.
But Trump’s refusal to concede is affecting Biden’s preparations, with transition funds unreleased and national security briefings not given.
Klain said the federal government needed to sign off on transition efforts this week, so briefings can begin, and so Biden can begin to address the Covid-19 crisis.
Hutchinson agreed, telling NBC: “It is very important that Joe Biden have access to the intelligence briefings to make sure that he is prepared.
“During times of transition our enemies have an opportunity to take advantage of us, and we want to make sure that there is a smooth transition, particularly when it comes to the vaccine distribution [so that] everybody understands what we’re doing there and what the plan is for the future.”
But Hutchinson also pointed to a problem for Republican elected officials, which is that Trump retains the support of most Republican voters – many of whom believe his claims about the election.
“Clearly, President Trump will have a voice for a long time in the party,” Hutchinson said. “Anybody that can generate those kinds of crowds … will have an influence for some time to come.”
On Saturday, Trump supporters gathered in Washington to back the president and reject Biden. Trump waved to the crowd from his motorcade, as it drove to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.
On Sunday, the president had no public events on his schedule. From the White House, he issued volley after volley of tweets. Then he drove back to his golf course.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
