President Donald Trump‘s team is struggling to decide who will have to tell him he’s lost the election as Joe Biden appears on the cusp of securing the White House.
Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia Friday morning as votes were counted overnight. There is no path to victory for President Trump without those states.
But Trump has told allies he won’t concede should the race be called for his Democratic rival.
So discussions have begun about an intervention with the president – who would go in and tell him he’s lost and it’s time to concede.
Names being floated include the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka Trump, both of whom serve as advisers in the White House, CNN reported.
Members of the Republican Party are also worried the president won’t go quietly and are discussing taking action of their own.
They are considering how to break it to Trump he needs to go, perhaps suggesting to him that leaving quietly can help him, his family, and his business along with reminding him he can run again in 2024, The New York Times reported.
Trump also is considering holding a political rally this weekend if there’s no final result in the presidential race, The Times reported.
Trump held 14 rallies in seven states in the last three days of the election and draws energy from his cheering crowd of supporters – a round of cheering up he could use.
But he also uses his rallies to rile up supporters. Trump supporters have been demonstrating at vote counting centers in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. In someplace, the National Guard has been called in to maintain order.
Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania on Friday morning with 5,5870 votes. The remaining votes to be counted in the state – which is the largest prize in the electoral college carrying 20 votes – are mostly in Biden strongholds of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania.
If Biden takes Pennsylvania, he will have soared past the 270 electoral college votes he needs to claim victory, an agonizing two-and-a-half days after polls closed.
Here is how the other states break down;
- In Georgia, Biden leads by 1,067 with some 8,000 votes left to count and another 8,000 possible mail-ins from overseas military. It is worth 16 electoral college points
- In Arizona, Biden leads by 47,000 votes with another 200,000 to count
- In Nevada, Biden leads by 11,438 with some 50,000 left to count
- North Carolina still has not been called. It is likely to go to Trump but makes no difference to the breakdown of electoral college seats
Trump is refusing to accept what now seems like an inevitable defeat. On Thursday night, he launched an astonishing, 17-minute tirade from the White House briefing room where he claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy by big tech, big money, the Democrats, and the media.
He has vowed not to accept the final results, and some of his own children are telling the country to ‘fight to the death’ not to accept them either.
Trump claimed on Thursday that if all ‘legal votes’ were counted he would win the election as he charged Democrats with trying to steal the contest ‘corruptly’ through mail-in ballots.
All three broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – cut away from his press conference before it finished, warning their viewers that Trump had made ‘a number of false statements’ that needed clarifying.
Biden also gave a speech Thursday, calling for calm and patience while the votes are counted, insisting once again that when the dust has settled he will have beaten Trump.
‘Democracy is sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well,’ the former vice president said from the stage of Wilmington’s Queen theater late Thursday afternoon.
‘So I ask everyone to stay calm, all people to stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed and we’ll know very soon.’
He also tweeted: ‘No one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever. America has come too far, fought too many battles, and endured too much to let that happen.
‘Keep the faith, folks.’
Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr gave a speech in Georgia, where Trump’s lead is now just a few hundred votes, calling for his father to ‘fight to the death’ and urging him to ‘go to war’ to ‘expose all of the fraud that has been going on for far too long.’
‘Americans need to know that this is not a banana republic and right now very few people have faith that’s not the case,’ he added.
At the podium in the briefing room on Thursday night, President Trump read from a script and listed his grievances at Biden’s campaign, ‘suppression polls’ and ‘fraud.’
He left without taking a question as CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta shouted: ‘Are you a sore loser?’ – then his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had to scuttle back to the podium because he had forgotten to take his notes with him.
