With the vote count nearing completion and Joe Biden securing both the upper-midwest swing states and, according to Fox News and the AP, the state of Arizona, President Donald Trump's only electoral path to victory is winning every other state yet to be called: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada. This is quite unlikely, so he's already turned to plans B and C: sue and rant.
Members of the Trump campaign, including Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani, held a press conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday afternoon in which they claimed Donald Trump has not only won the state of Pennsylvania, but the entire US presidential election.
Eric Trump spoke first, alleging that Democrats are trying to "cheat" by committing mass voter fraud and vowing to file a lawsuit to halt vote-counting in Pennsylvania.
"We're going to win Pennsylvania, but they're trying to cheat us out of it because they know it's their only path to victory," he said. "We are going to file a suit in Pennsylvania. It is the last thing that we wanted to do, it's the last thing my father wanted to do. But this is rampant corruption. It can't happen. It's not fair. This isn't democracy."
None of these remarks have any evidence to back them up, and few are bothering to credit them as anything but lies.
In tweets quickly flagged by Twitter as misleading or with a message warning readers that the vote count was not over, Trump launched into a Michael Scott-like declaration of victory.
"We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won't allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact,……….there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!"
The weightless claims alarmed election-watchers, however, as they make clear that Trump has no intention of conceding defeat if he loses—and bring renewed attention to his earlier refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in that case.
