Donald Trump, who still refuses to accept Joe Biden’s victory, continued his crusade on Friday, mainly with tweets, raising questions about how he intends to get out of what has all of a dead end.
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When will the American president acknowledge his defeat to allow a normal transition? Bombed with questions on this subject, her spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, dodged.
“The president has launched legal actions, he is taking things day by day,” she simply replied, during a particularly tense press briefing.
Reclusive in the White House, he was however to speak at the beginning of the afternoon on the fall in the prices of drugs, one of his hobby horses for several months.
He started his day by retweeting a video of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s astounding press conference.
Thursday, for nearly two hours, the latter, dripping with sweat, multiplying digressions, accused, without evidence, the Democratic Party of having organized a large-scale fraud.
The US president was to receive local elected officials from Michigan on Friday, a key state he won in 2016 against Hillary Clinton and which he lost this year to Joe Biden.
This invitation, or the moment when the state must certify the results of the November 3 election on Monday, sparked an outcry.
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Bob Bauer, lawyer for the Biden team, denounced Friday an initiative “distressing” and “pathetic”.
“This is an abuse of power, it is a deliberate attempt to intimidate election officials,” he said, while expressing his belief that the initiative was doomed to failure.
Thursday evening, Republican Senator Mitt Romney accused the president of exerting “clear pressure on national and local authorities” to “reverse the will of the people”. “It is difficult to imagine a worse and more undemocratic action on the part of a US president in office,” he blurted out.
AFP
Republican Senator Mitt Romney.
Asked about this meeting, Kayleigh McEnany said, without convincing, that it had nothing to do with the electoral results and was part of the president’s classic meetings with various elected officials of the country.
Overwhelmed by this fight against what he calls a “rigged” election, Donald Trump gives the feeling of having abandoned any desire to govern.
Thursday, he did not participate, in the White House, in the press briefing of the crisis cell on the coronavirus, where were present the vice-president Mike Pence and the immunologist Anthony Fauci.
American stern gaze
“It is difficult to understand how this man reasons,” Joe Biden said Thursday.
“I am convinced that he knows he lost and that I will be sworn in on January 20. What he is doing is simply scandalous, ”he added the next president who celebrated his 78th birthday on Friday, two months to the day before taking office.
In a study released Friday, the Pew Research Center analyzed Americans’ views on the behavior of Donald Trump and Joe Biden since the November 3 election.
The result is final and harsh for the current tenant of the White House: only 31% of those questioned think that his attitude was “good” or “excellent” (against 62% for Joe Biden).
Nationally, Joe Biden won nearly 80 million votes in the November ballot, compared to just under 74 million for the Republican billionaire.
But the presidency is played out through a system of elected voters in each state, and the Democrat’s victory is short in a handful of them.
In Georgia, the initial count gave him just 14,000 votes ahead of his rival, a gap so narrow that a hand recount took place.
Local authorities announced Thursday evening that this recount had confirmed Joe Biden as the winner of this state, with a slightly narrowed margin of about 12,200 votes.
The certification of the results was to be announced in the evening.
Proof of the growing unease – but so far rather silent – that the president’s attitude has aroused within the Republican Party, one of its senators, Lamar Alexander, called on Donald Trump to initiate the transition. He did not call Joe Biden president-elect, but felt he had “a very good chance” of winning.
If Mr. Alexander, elected from Tennessee, is preparing to leave his seat, he is however the highest Republican in the Senate to take a position in this direction since the announcement of the results on November 7.