President Trump announced himself the possible victor of the presidential election in an early Wednesday speech and pledged to go to the Supreme Court to prevent Democrats from using “fraud” to enable Joe Biden to win.
“A large number of people decided in favor of us today. Furthermore, a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t represent it,” Trump said in a speech from the White House East Room that started at 2:21 am.
“This is a misrepresentation on the American public. This is a shame to our nation. We were preparing to win this election. Honestly, we won this election. So our objective currently is to guarantee 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!”
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.
As of early Wednesday, Trump appeared on track to lose only one state he won in 2016 — Arizona, according to a Fox News projection. Republicans say it’s too soon to declare a winner, as The Associated Press says a fifth of ballots are uncounted. Fox News also projected that Biden will win one electoral vote from Nebraska’s 1st Congressional District, which Trump carried in 2016.
Trump won a resounding victory in Florida, however, and was ahead in Georgia and North Carolina at the time of his speaking.
Biden gave his own rosy projections in an after-midnight speech in Wilmington, Del., saying, “We feel good about where we are. We really do. I’m here to tell you tonight that we believe we’re on track to win this election.”
