What did Trump say about Biden and voter fraud?
In a 46-minute Facebook rant, Trump again took aim at unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, even positing the Biden should be denied the presidency.
Yesterday the lame duck president Donald Trump seriously escalated his attack on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. In a 46-minute video rant from the White House and posted to Facebook, Trump spouted yet more unfounded and unproven allegations on widespread voter fraud.
The somewhat desperate ramble was littered with untruths, many of them well-worn allegations that have already been spouted on the president’s Twitter feed and Newsmax. Trump seemed to believe differently though, starting the address with the assertion that it “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made.”
Facebook labelled the post “both voting in person and voting by post have a long history of trustworthiness in the US. Voter fraud is extremely rare across voting methods.”
What did Trump say about voter fraud and Joe Biden?
As per usual, the president’s main gripe was with the predictable surge in mail-in ballots this year, as many voters (disproportionately Democrats) opted to stay away from the polls physically this year, among fears of further spreading the coronavirus.
Trump whined that “we used to have what was called Election Day. Now we have election days, weeks and months, and lots of bad things happened during this ridiculous period of time.”
Among the absurd and unfounded claims “corrupt forces” had stuffed ballot boxes with fraudulent votes, what’s more, Trump alleges that the fraud was “massive” and “on a scale never seen before.” He attacked Dominion Voting Systems yet again, but there is no evidence that votes were in any way compromised and Dominion has said there is no merit to Trump’s claims.
And according to Trump, what’s the easiest solution to the baseless claims of fraud? The newly imbalanced Supreme Court, of course. He called upon SCOTUS to “do what’s right for our country,” which he suggested would entail discarding hundreds of thousands of votes so that “I very easily win in all states.”
At one point he took aim at his successor and president-elect; "if we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can't be president. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. We're talking about numbers like nobody has ever seen before."
Trump went on to threaten that “if we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore.”
What’s happening in Trump’s lawsuits?
Although just last week Trump finally gave authorisation to his dedicated team to cooperate with Biden’s transition team, giving them access to funds, office space and classified information, he still refuses to admit defeat.
In highly successful appeals to his 70 million plus supporters to fund his on going struggle in the courts, Trump’s team have so far raised over $170 million since 3 November. So far, Donald Trump has filed over 40 separate lawsuits in six key battleground states, contesting the results of the 2020 election which he has already lost. Most of them have been shot down or withdrawn, and no court has found even a single instance of fraud. Of at least 41 cases to have been filed, including some not directly involving Trump but which could nonetheless affect his standing, at least 26 have been denied, dismissed, settled or withdrawn. Many are still pending decisions.
His extraordinarily long social media rant came just a day after Attorney General William Barr admitted to the Associated Press that following investigation by the Justice Department and the F.B.I., “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election decisively with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232, and 7 million more votes in the popular vote. Biden won back many key battleground states in the Rust Belt as well as flipping some long-time Republican strongholds. The majority of states have already certified their election tallies ahead of the 14 December meeting of electors which will finalise the national result in Biden’s favour.