Trump hunkers down for legal fight on chaotic day that embodied his entire presidency

Lawsuits, unsubstantiated tweets – and binoculars. The first post-election day was a poetic summary of president’s entire term

Donald Trump, holed up in the White House’s private residence, is digging in for a legal fight to try blocking Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden from ending his turbulent presidency.

"It's clear that we're winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency,” "the former vice president said late Wednesday afternoon, flanked by his running made, California Senator Kamala Harris. “I'm not here to declare that we've won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners.”

There were few in Washington who expected the president described by his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, as a political “streetfighter,” to accept a loss or leave office quietly. He has kicked and screamed and pushed back and attacked during his nearly four years in office, changing positions on issues and switching tactics 180-degrees seemingly on a gut feeling.

The 45th president and his team continued doing just that on Wednesday, a day that might have spelled the beginning of the end of his time in office and succinctly summed up his chaotic style.

“VICTORY for President @realDonaldTrump in PENNSYLVANIA,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted, drawing this rebuke from the social media giant: “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted”. In fact, nor The Associated Press nor any mainstream news outlet nor friendly Fox News has yet to declare either candidate the winner there.

The former vice president moved within 22 Electoral College votes of securing the 270 needed to be on track to become the 46th president-elect, barring any federal courts’ decisions that would reverse vote results in states The Associated Press has called in his favour. That came when the wire service handed him, for now at least, the state’s 10 electoral votes.

It was the second state Mr Biden has flipped from those the president won in 2016 after AP awarded him Arizona’s 11 electoral votes. It means, as of 5pm eastern time, Mr Biden could win the presidency if he is declared the winner in Michigan and Nevada – giving him a path that is not, in a twist from pre-election prognostications worthy of this unpredictable and unprecedented, dependent on winning Pennsylvania.

But the Trump campaign signalled it is less than confident the president would win the Keystone State after barnstorming from rally to rally there in the campaign’s final weeks. It did so using the kind of rhetoric Mr Trump used during rally after rally to fire up his conservative base for the large turnout it recorded across the country.

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"Pennsylvania’s unhinged, radical left Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar, has tried her hardest to bake in a backdoor to victory for Joe Biden with late, illegal ballots in collusion with the partisan state supreme court,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said Wednesday. “The United States Constitution is clear on this issue: the legislature sets the time, place, and manner of elections in America, not state courts or executive officials.”

“As the president has rightly said, the Supreme Court must resolve this crucial contested legal question, so President Trump’s campaign is moving to intervene in the existing Supreme Court litigation over the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s unlawful extension of the mail-in ballot receipt deadline,” he added.

On an afternoon call with reporters, Mr Stepien called for the AP’s call in Arizona to be “reversed immediately.” The president trails in that state by just over 93,500 votes with around 650,000 ballots uncounted, and around 57 per cent of all ballots have marks in his favour, Mr Stepien claimed.

As the campaign also filed a lawsuit to stop vote-counting in Michigan, the president’s top campaign official predicted victory there, as well as in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

‘Crooks’

“By the end of this week, it will be clear to the entire country that President Trump and Vice President Pence will be re-elected,” Mr Stepien said with a defiance, bravado that sounded a lot like his boss.

He spoke to reporters as a team of Trump lawyers and advisers that included former Florida GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and presidential son Eric Trump were blocked by protestors from briefing reporters in downtown Philadelphia around 3:30pm. That was moved to the safety of an airport hangar.

Eric Trump and Mr Giuliani contended Pennsylvania leaders blocked Republican officials from viewing vote-counting and looking at individual ballots, something it is not clear they would have done legally.

Mr Giulini alluded to hundreds of thousands of “meaningless paper ballots that nobody gets to observe,” saying some of those “could be from Mars” and  alleging a “concerted effort of the crooks that run the Democratic Party.” He threatened more lawsuits in other swing states and perhaps even a “national lawsuit to expose the corruption of the Democratic Party.” A few moments later, Ms Bondi was speaking about binoculars and their count observers being denied clear paths to seeing physical ballots.

The chaotic day of lawsuits and mixed messages, in so many ways, was a microcosm of Mr Trump’s rollercoaster-like term.

Meantime, in Delaware, Mr Biden used part of his brief remarks to begin pursuing his goals of tending to partisan wounds made worse by Mr Trump’s brash style and hardline policies.

He said he would “govern as an American president,” declaring – perhaps prematurely – there would be “no blue states and red states.”

“We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied,” he said. “We the people will not surrender.”