After Democratic candidate Joe Biden was officially projected as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump has refused to concede. However, members of Trump’s administration appear to be picking straws to figure who is going to convince the president to finally step down, according to numerous reports coming from sources inside The White House.
On November 8, “First Lady Melania Trump has joined the growing chorus of President Trump’s inner circle advising him the time has come for him to accept the loss, a source familiar with the conversations tells CNN,” tweeted reporter Brian Stelter.
Biden was first projected to win the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes the morning of Friday, November 6, after he took the lead over Trump by a margin there of 3,295,373 votes to 3,289,959, and Decision Desk HQ officially announced Biden as the projected president-elect at 8:54 a.m.
On Friday, Biden moved to a projected Electoral College lead of 273 to 214. On Saturday, CNN, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, and other major media outlets caught up to Decision Desk HQ and called Biden as the victor Saturday morning. Later in the evening, Biden’s campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said that Trump has not reached out to Biden to congratulate him, which has long been the custom classy move when accepting defeat.
On Sunday morning, Symone Sanders, Biden’s senior advisor, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of Union that “a number of Republicans from the Hill have reached out,” but she doesn’t believe “anyone from the White House has.”
Jared Kushner Has Also Approached the President to Step Down, According to Reports
GettyPresident Donald Trump (R) delivers remarks at the beginning of a meeting with his son-in-law and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner and government cyber security experts in the Roosevelt Room.
On Saturday night, CNN reported that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who’s served as Trump’s senior advisor since he took office, was trying to convince his father-in-law to step down. Married to Ivanka Trump, with whom he shares three children, Kushner has thus far not been successful in getting Trump to deliver a concession speech.
In fact, Trump continues to double down on his belief that there was election fraud despite not being able to provide any evidence to prove as such. Trump tweeted on Sunday, “We believe these people are thieves. The big city machines are corrupt. This was a stolen election. Best pollster in Britain wrote this morning that this clearly was a stolen election, that it’s impossible to imagine that Biden outran Obama in some of these states.”
The tweet was quickly flagged by Twitter as being a “disputed” claim about election fraud. As was the following Twitter thread the president shared on November 8. He tweeted:
We should look at the votes. We’re just beginning the tabulation stage. We should look at these allegations. We’re seeing a number of affidavits that there has been voter fraud. We have a history in this country of election problems. In Pennsylvania you had an order by a…
….Supreme Court Justice to compel them to separate ballots that were received after the legislative deadline. It required the intervention of Justice Alito. That’s a large group of ballots. When you talk about systemic problems, it’s about…
….how these ballots were authenticated, because if there’s a problem in the system about authentication, that would seriously affect the ENTIRE ELECTION – And what concerns me is that we had over a hundred million mail-in ballot in cites like Philladelphia…and Detroit with a long series of election problems (to put it mildly).” @JonathanTurley
Trump Was Golfing When Major News Networks Announced Biden Would Become the 46th President of the United States
Watch this drive …
As @JoeBiden clinches the presidency, @realDonaldTrump is playing golf
While major news networks such as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC called Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Trump was golfing in Sterling, Virginia. Video of Trump on his golf course was shared on Twitter by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Karl captioned the video, “Watch this drive … As @JoeBiden clinches the presidency, @realDonaldTrump is playing golf.”
Pictures of Trump heading to his golf course were published by The Guardian a few hours before the official announcement regarding the new president-elect was made on November 7. Trump appeared “wearing a white MAGA cap, windbreaker, dark slacks, non-dress shirt” and “shoes that look appropriate for golfing.”
Trump made it clear that he was not going to be making a concession speech any time soon. On November 6, his campaign issued a statement from its general counsel, Matt Morgan, saying, “This election is not over. The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
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