Trump rehashes unsubstantiated voter fraud charges

Increasingly detached from reality, President Donald Trump stood before a White House lectern and delivered a 46-minute diatribe against the election results that produced a win for Democrat Joe Biden, unspooling one misstatement after another to back his baseless claim that he really won.

The video was released Wednesday.

Trump called his address, released only on social media and delivered in front of no audience, perhaps "the most important speech" of his presidency. But it was largely a recycling of the same litany of misinformation and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud that he has been making for the past month.

"The president's goal seems to be to leave millions of Americans with a false impression about what happened in this election," said Julie Pace, Washington Bureau Chief for the Associated Press.

"He is trying to sow doubt about the results, despite the fact that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud," she said.

Trump, who spoke from the Diplomatic Room, kept up his futile pushback against the election even as state after state certifies its results and as Biden presses ahead with shaping his Cabinet in advance of his inauguration on Jan. 20.

Biden received a record 80 million votes compared to 74 million for Trump. The Democrat also won 306 electoral votes compared to 232 for Trump. The Electoral College split matches Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago.

Trump dug further into his contention of a "rigged election" even though members of his own administration, including Attorney General William Barr, say that no proof of widespread voter fraud has been uncovered. Courts in multiple battleground states have thrown out a barrage of lawsuits filed on behalf of the president.

"The fact that the president is coming out a day after Bill Barr's comments and making these baseless accusations about the election shows that he was not moved by Bill Barr's assertions," Pace said, even as some of his closest supporters "really made clear that they do not agree with these claims the president continues to make."

"This is not just about honoring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me," Trump said. "It's about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election. And in all future elections."

About an hour after it was posted, Trump's video had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook and shared by more than 60,000 Facebook users, according to data from CrowdTangle. Both Facebook and Twitter flagged the president's posting, with Twitter noting that Trump's claims about election fraud are disputed.