Tag: Trump refusal to accept election results

20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election

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The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ” Continue reading.

‘A grand scheme’: Trump’s election defiance consumes GOP

Many party officials are suggesting to the rank and file that the election was stolen or that the outcome stands to be reversed.

It was just noise when it started — Donald Trump spouting wild, unsubstantiated claims about election fraud, his lawyer seething at an almost comical press conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business.

But one week after an election in which Joe Biden received close to 5 million more popular votes than Trump and captured more than 270 electoral votes, the president and top Republican Party officials are nowhere near conceding.

And with his posturing — and statements of Cabinet officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — Trump is fueling a bonfire that’s consuming the GOP and disrupting the traditional transfer of power. Continue reading.

Trump, who never admits defeat, mulls how to keep up fight

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump never admits defeat. But he faces a stark choice now that Democrat Joe Biden has won the White House: Concede graciously for the sake of the nation or don’t — and get evicted anyway.

After nearly four tortured days of counting yielded a victory for Biden, Trump was still insisting the race was not over. He threw out baseless allegations that the election wasn’t fair and “illegal” votes were counted, promised a flurry of legal action and fired off all-caps tweets falsely insisting he’d “WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT.”

While some in his circle were nudging Trump to concede graciously, many of his Republican allies, including on Capitol Hill, were egging him on or giving him space to process his loss — at least for the time being.  Continue reading.

Denial, and Resignation, From Trump and a Handful of Aides

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Aides said the president had no plans to immediately deliver the kind of concession speech that has become traditional in past elections, and his campaign vowed to continue waging its legal battle across the country.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s motorcade was just pulling into the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia on Saturday morning when news organizations ended days of waiting and declared that he had lost the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Aides called Mr. Trump to let him know that their predictions over the past several days had come true: Every major news outlet had projected Mr. Biden to be the winner. But the president — who an hour earlier had said on Twitter that “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” — was not surprised, they said. And he did not change his plans to go ahead with legal challenges to the election results that several of his own advisers warned him were long shots at best, or to play golf.

The aides said Mr. Trump had no plans to immediately deliver the kind of concession speech that has become traditional in past presidential elections, and his campaign vowed to continue waging the legal battle across the country. In a statement issued while he was still on the golf course, Mr. Trump said Mr. Biden was trying to “falsely pose” as the winner. Continue reading.