President Donald Trump, yesterday, declared that he would not let a “rigged election steal” his country.
Tweeting on his official handle, the American leader alleged that President-elect Joe Biden’s supporters were “attacking his supporters who are on a peaceful street protest in Washington DC.”
Trump has refused to concede defeat weeks after Biden was declared the winner of the recent polls. He has blocked his successor’s transition, withholding intelligence briefings, pandemic information, and access to government.
The President however appeared to publicly acknowledge for the first time that his Democratic contestant, Biden, won the November 3 polls, but reiterated his claim that the vote was compromised.
“He won because the election was rigged. No vote watchers or observers allowed, vote tabulated by a radical left private company,” Trump tweeted. “I concede nothing,” he added in another tweet shortly after.
Biden’s incoming Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, largely dismissed Trump’s failure to recognise the former vice president’s victory in an interview on Sunday.
“If the President is prepared to begin to recognise that reality, that is positive,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press programme. However, he added: “Donald Trump’s Twitter feed doesn’t make Joe Biden president or not president, the American people did that.”
The incumbent is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Biden’s aides.
The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, the President-elect’s team, and independent public health experts as COVID-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 lives a day.
More than 246,000 Americans have died from the disease, and a bitter winter lies ahead even amid encouraging news such as yesterday’s announcement that a vaccine developed by Moderna is demonstrating a high success rate in early clinical trials, the second of such positive vaccine news in about a week.
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