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Before the ballots were thoroughly tallied, Trump wrongly declared victory
President Donald Trump prematurely declared victory in the 2020 election early Wednesday morning, telling a live TV crowd that he had already won — while simultaneously threatening to take legal action against votes that have yet to be counted, even though several states are continuing to process valid mail-in ballots.
Frankly, we won this race, said Trump, while simultaneously implying that he would take legal action to prevent extra votes from being counted.
Initially, Trump fell short of claiming a victory, instead of dwelling on individual states where he did well. Even there, though, he seems to have lied about some of the details — inducing NBC News to cut him off and genuinely check him out in real time:
NBC News cuts off Trump. Savannah Guthrie: “We’ve got to dip in here because there’ve been several statements that are just frankly not true.” pic.twitter.com/4cUCqqMRR8
— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) November 4, 2020
At one point earlier in his address, Trump said that he needed to curb his vote and said that he would go to the Supreme Court, but it was not clear on what. "We're going to the Supreme Court of the United States; we want people to stop voting, we don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the registry," he said, wrongly claiming that the remaining ballots are somehow unconstitutional.
But at the end of his speech, Trump wrongly claimed victory in the presidential race. He called it a fraud to the American public and a embarrassment to our government that he had not yet been able to enjoy the triumph.
Although CNN didn't specifically verify Trump in his address, it called him out after the airing, clearly pointed out that he hasn't advanced yet, and that states haven't yet approved results. That kind of plain language is, in some ways, a step above what we've seen from Twitter and Facebook, placing stickers on Trump's misleading tweet late Tuesday night.
After the speech, however, Facebook placed a generic alert about voting counts at the top of Facebook and Instagram feeds:
Once President Trump began making premature claims of victory, we started running notifications on Facebook and Instagram that votes are still being counted and a winner is not projected. We're also automatically applying labels to both candidates’ posts with this information. pic.twitter.com/tuGGLJkwcy
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) November 4, 2020
