Even as millions of votes are still being counted, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday declared himself the winner in several key states and said he intended to go to the Supreme Court.
“I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support,” Trump said, adding that “A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
“We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop,” Trump continued. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list,” CNBC quoted the US President as saying.
The report noted that it was unclear what Trump meant by “going to the Supreme Court” because that the highest court is rarely the first judicial venue for a case, but rather, it reviews previous courts’ rulings.
Election officials said that it could be days before a winner is declared, as HuffPost reported. Several states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — were still counting the mail-in ballots deep into Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning.
Trump’s remarks followed a series of tweets and posts in which he declared victory and alleged efforts to steal US election. Twitter and Facebook moved against Trump’s posts.
Twitter said a Trump tweet alleging an effort to steal the election was potentially misleading and Facebook flagged a Trump post which said: “We are up BIG.”
Trump’s premature claims of victory were also countered by media, reminding people that counting of votes is still underway.
MSNBC’s Brian Williams interrupted broadcast of Trump’s speech to point out that the US president’s claims about already winning the 2020 Presidential election while millions of votes remained uncounted were “not based in the facts at all.”
NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie said, “The fact of the matter is we don’t know who won the election.” Guthrie had interrupted Trump’s speech to tell viewers that several of Trump’s statements were not true, AP reported.