President finally admits defeat — then immediately continues spreading misinformation
Chris Riotta | Sunday 15 November 2020
President Donald Trump has finally admitted to losing the election — while continuing to spread outright lies and misinformation about false allegations of mass voter fraud.
After days of refusing to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, the president wrote in a tweet on Sunday morning: “He won because the Election was Rigged.”
The president has continued to post statements on social media that were false and even flagged by platforms like Twitter and Facebook for containing misleading information about the election.
Mr Trump falsely claimed in all-caps there were “NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS” allowed in the polling places, which is simply not true and can be easily disputed by the witness statements and video evidence of polling place observers watching the ballot count all across the country.
Before Sunday, the president repeatedly refused to accept the fact he lost the election, even as a wave of legal challenges he filed against the electoral process were notably failing in key states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, as the law firms representing his campaign unexpectedly pulled out of their respective cases.
The president almost admitted to his defeat on Friday at the White House at a press conference surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.
Discussing the election, Mr Trump again claimed the vote was “rigged” while failing to provide any evidence. He also said his administration would not enforce lockdown measures to combat the novel virus that has killed nearly 250,000 Americans, saying: “Ideally we won’t go to a lockdown. I will not go. This administration will not be going to a lockdown.”
“Hopefully, the, the whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell,” he said, adding: “But I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown.”
It seemed he was finally ready to say he lost the election just a few days later, though he continued to claim that loss was the result of a rigged election — something his own Department of Homeland Security rejected when it said the 2020 election was “the most secure” in American history.
In a follow-up tweet, Mr Trump alleged Democrats “succeeded plenty” in the election due to voter fraud while adding: “Mail-in elections are a sick joke!”
However, a vast pool of research and analysis has shown mail-in voting to be a safe and effective way to cast ballots in an election without fear of rigging or cheating.
Virtually all of the president’s claims about voter fraud have been consistently debunked: his campaign falsely said a dead voter cast a ballot when an elderly woman confirmed she was alive and had voted against Mr Trump; it also falsely said military families were casting illegal ballots when in fact they were not; and it also falsely said that Mr Trump could only lose the election if there was mass voter fraud. None of this is true.
