Donald Trump Photograph:( AFP )
This is the closest the incumbent US president has come to conceding defeat in the November 3 vote.
Donald Trump has said he'd leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden.
This is the closest the incumbent US president has come to conceding defeat in the November 3 vote.
Trump has so far refused to fully acknowledge his defeat, though earlier this week - with mounting pressure from his own Republican ranks - he agreed to let Biden's transition process officially proceed. Frenzied efforts by him and his aides to overturn results in key states, either by lawsuits or by pressuring state legislators, have failed, and he is running out of options.
On the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, Trump spoke to reporters and said, "Certainly I will. Certainly I will. And you know that," when asked if he'd leave if the electoral college votes for Biden.
He also added it would be hard for him to concede because "we know there was massive fraud."
"It was a rigged election ... at the highest level," Trump insisted in a sometimes rambling discourse at the White House, while continuing to offer no concrete evidence of widespread voting irregularities.
It was the first time Trump has taken questions from reporters since November 3.
In the United States, a candidate becomes president by securing the most “electoral” votes rather than by winning a majority of the national popular vote. Electors, allotted to the 50 states and the District of Columbia largely based on their population, are party loyalists who pledge to support the candidate who won the popular vote in their state.
Biden won the election with 306 Electoral College votes - many more than the 270 required - to Trump's 232, and the electors are scheduled to meet on Dec. 14 to formalize the outcome. Biden also leads Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally.
Trump said on Thursday he would travel on December 5 to Georgia, a once solidly Republican state he lost narrowly to Biden, to campaign for two Republican US Senate candidates.
The two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 will determine whether the Republicans keep their majority in the Senate.
"I just want to tell my people: don't be disappointed yet because this race is far from over," Trump said.
Meanwhile, Biden appeared with his wife in a video message posted on his Twitter account on Thanksgiving, and said his family typically holds a large gathering on the island of Nantucket off Massachusetts, but would remain in Delaware this year "with just a small group around our dinner table" because of the pandemic.
In the presidential-style address to a nation that has lost more than 260,000 lives to the coronavirus, the Democratic president-elect said on Wednesday Americans were making a "shared sacrifice for the whole country" and a "statement of common purpose" by staying at home with their immediate families.