As America awaits a winner, Donald Trump falsely claims he prevailed

With no winner declared in the 2020 presidential race, President Donald Trump appeared in the White House early Wednesday to brazenly claim he had already won the election — and to insist that votes stop being counted even as the ballots of millions of Americans were still being tallied.

Speaking with a mix of defiance, anger and wonder that the election had not yet been called in his favor, the president recounted his standing in an array of battleground states before falsely declaring: “Frankly, we did win this election.”

No major news organizations had declared a winner between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count, in part because state and local Republican officials had insisted that they not be counted until Election Day.

Trump said, without offering any explanation, that “we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court,” and added, “We want all voting to stop.”

No elected leader has the right to unilaterally order votes to stop being counted, and Trump’s middle-of-the-night proclamation amounted to a reckless attempt to hijack the electoral process as results in key battleground states were still not final, something without precedent in American politics.

Also read: Rigged election: Donald Trump's long-running fraud claims

The president contradicted himself about the vote-counting as he claimed he was gaining strength in Arizona, where votes cast on Election Day were breaking in his favor but where mail-in ballots favored Biden, the Democratic nominee. Trump spoke at times from a teleprompter, but he veered off his prepared remarks to make unfounded claims about voting fraud.

The president made his remarks just after 2 a.m. as Biden was leading in Arizona. If Biden were to win there, it would be the first state Trump won in 2016 that flipped to the Democrats this year.

Biden, for his part, adopted a different tone and approach shortly beforehand when he addressed supporters in his home state of Delaware. Biden projected optimism but asked voters for patience. He pointed to Pennsylvania and Michigan, among other battlegrounds, as slow-counting states that he expected to win.

Also read: Joe Biden and Donald Trump are locked in tight race as uncounted votes remain

“As I’ve said all along, it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Biden said.

As of early Wednesday, the race remained shrouded in uncertainty.

Trump dashed Democrats’ hopes of picking up both Florida and Ohio, two swing states that Trump carried four years ago. He also turned back a challenge from Biden in Iowa.

The president was at risk of being eliminated from contention if one of the big, historically Republican states of the Southeast had defected to Biden. That was still a possibility in North Carolina or Georgia, where the vote tally was closely divided.