U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a rally to contest the certification of the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election by the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.
Jim Bourg | Reuters
President Donald Trump lied about the results of the presidential election and boasted of the size of a crowd at a rally on Wednesday where he refused to admit the defeat of President-elect Joe Biden.
“We will never give up, we will never concede,” Trump told attendees outside the White House, who cheered him on an hour before Congress kicked off to begin the process of confirming Biden’s victory at the College. Electoral.
“We’ll stop the theft!” Trump said as he took the stage, after the crowd waited for his appearance as he listened to pop songs like “Macho Man,” “Don’t Stop Believing” and “Tiny Dancer.”
The lame duck Republican also reiterated a call on his own vice president, Mike Pence, to refuse to accept the validity of Biden Electoral College ballots from various battlefield states.
Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump gather at Presidents Park on the White House Ellipse for a rally and speech to contest certification by the U.S. Congress of the results of the U.S. presidential election. Americans in Washington, USA, January 6, 2021.
Jim Bourg | Reuters
Experts say Pence does not have that power when he chairs the joint session of Congress, as he confirms state election result certifications Wednesday afternoon.
“I hope Mike does the right thing,” Trump said. “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we will win the election.”
“He has the absolute right to do so.”
More than a dozen Republican senators and up to 100 or more members of the House are expected to challenge the results of some states, but this effort is not expected to frustrate Biden’s victory, as both the Senate and the House is on its way to confirming its victories in these states.
Trump, like two months ago, claimed he won the popular vote directly, when in fact he lost by more than 7 million popular votes against the former Democratic vice president.
“We won it by current,” he stated. “It wasn’t an upcoming election.”
Trump also claimed that they “cheated like hell” in Georgia’s two special Senate elections on Tuesday, where challenging Democrat Raphael Warnock has projected a winner over Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and where another Democrat, Jon Ossoff , led by Republican David Perdue in the vote.
Trump and his allies claim, without any evidence, that there was widespread voting fraud in several states, which in turn allowed those states to allow the votes of their constituency to be granted to Biden. The Democrat got 306 electoral votes, 36 more than he needs to win the White House.
Trump had won the same margin in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.
“They called an election. They fixed it like never before,” Trump said Wednesday.
However, no court has invalidated any vote for Biden on a claim by the Trump campaign or his supporters that fraud was committed.
Trump-related legal efforts to challenge Biden’s victory, which have included the petition for the U.S. Supreme Court to move to the issue, have been broadly defeated or withdrawn.
The president lamented the Supreme Court, which has three judges appointed by Trump, and said the high court “likes to rule against me.”
Trump’s ramblings on Wednesday soon turned to him asking “Where’s the hunter?”
He had hoped that the statements he made about Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, during the election would help him win a second term.