'Easily won': Trump lashes out at 'illegal votes' and 'fake polls'
US President Donald Trump has made sensational baseless claims in a speech to the American people as the world eagerly awaits the outcome of the 2020 US election.
Trump said he has “easily won” as he hit out at alleged fraud at the polls.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he said.
“If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking into them very strongly. A lot of them have come in late. I already decisively won critical states including Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio.
“It is despite interference from big money, big tech. We won by historic numbers and the pollsters got it knowingly wrong.”
He also claimed media polling was election interference in the “truest sense of the word”.
“These really phoney polls, fake polls, were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr Biden and diminish Republican’s ability to raise funds,” Trump said.
The president added there had been a number of shenanigans and “we cannot stand for that in our country”.
He added mail-in voting was “corrupt” and had “destroyed” the system.
He accused the Democrats of waiting to see out how many votes they needed in certain states before “finding” the ballots.
“We were ahead in North Carolina by a tremendous number of votes and we are still ahead by a lot but not as many,” he said.
“It is amazing how one-sided the mail-in ballots [are].
“I won Pennsylvania by a lot and it gets whittled down to a think by 90,000 votes and they keep coming and coming and they find [ballots] all over.
“In Georgia, I won by a lot, with a lead getting close to 300,000 votes on election night in Georgia and by the way it got whittled down ... now it is getting to a point where I go from winning by a lot to perhaps being even down a little bit.”
Networks cut away from ‘appalling’ speech
Some have claimed Trump was “lying” about the voting process in his speech while a number of US networks cut away from him, including MSNBC, ABC and CBS.
“Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the President of the United States but correcting the President of the United States," MSNBC host Brian Williams lamented.
Trump is lying a lot about the vote counting process.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 5, 2020
"What a sad night for the United States of America," Jake Tapper said on CNN as the feed cut back to him.
"Watching him flail like this, it's just pathetic," he later added.
“Trump lies that he ‘won the state’ of Michigan and ‘did likewise’ in Wisconsin. This is just an absolutely appalling and anti-democratic series of lies,” CNN reporter Daniel Dale tweeted.
Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden tweeted following the president’s speech, saying “no one is going to take our democracy from us”.
“America has come too far, fought too many battles, and endured too much to let that happen,” he said.
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