President Trump telephoned into a hotel room meeting of Pennsylvania Republicans on Wednesday to rage against his election defeat, making unfounded claims of fraud and demanding the result be overturned.
Campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis held up her phone to a microphone so that the president, who was in the Oval Office, could deliver his remarks to supporters gathered at a Wyndham in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
“This was an election we won easily. We won it by a lot,” he said, even though President-elect Joe Biden has a lead of more than 6 million in the popular vote count and has been declared the winner by media organizations that monitor the tallies and forecast results.
Trump has cut an increasingly isolated figure in the weeks since Election Day. He has appeared only briefly in public, taking part in the traditional Thanksgiving pardoning of a turkey on Tuesday, while his administration officials have begun helping Biden’s team prepare for power.
Meanwhile, Biden delivered a Thanksgiving eve address, calling for unity and urging people to “steel our spines” to fight the coronavirus.
“Each of us has a responsibility in our own lives to do what we can to slow the virus,” he said from Wilmington, Delaware.
On Wednesday, there were plans for Trump to appear with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani at the Gettysburg hotel for a Republican-organized hearing about purported voter fraud.
It would have marked his first trip outside the Washington, D.C., area since the election.
However, it was abandoned just as members of the traveling press pool were preparing to depart. Instead, he addressed the meeting by telephone.
“This election was rigged, and we can’t let that happen,” he said. “We can’t let that happen for our country. And this election has to be turned around.”
His legal fight, trying to prevent states from certifying the results, has faced a string of setbacks. Judges have chastised campaign lawyers for not acting in good faith, failing to support allegations with evidence, and for being poorly prepared.
Trump’s campaign headquarters, which kept up with a barrage of press releases, conference calls, and statements in the immediate aftermath of the election, has fallen silent.
And at the weekend, those who remain on his legal team distanced themselves from lawyer Sidney Powell after she leveled a series of fraud claims at a chaotic news conference. She claimed Biden won because of “communist money” and that electronic voting systems switched millions of ballots to Biden, but she offered no supporting evidence.
Still, the president insisted he was fighting on.
“We won Pennsylvania by a lot,” he said, though Biden leads by more than 81,000 votes in the state. “We won all of these swing states by a lot.”
He claimed Republican poll watchers were treated “like dogs” and removed to pens 100 feet away from voting. He recounted claims of dead people using mail-in ballots in affidavits stacked “to the ceiling.”
“All we need is for some judge to listen to it properly, without having a political opinion,” he said, before addressing his splintering legal team. “I want to thank Rudy Giuliani for having the courage to do this.”
He continued: “There were other lawyers that backed down because they were being screamed at. This is going to be your crowning achievement because you are saving our country.”
The room erupted to chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump” when he rang off.
