President Donald Trump falsely claimed victory in the 2020 presidential election at the White House in the early hours of Wednesday morning, as several key swing states were still tallying hundreds of thousands of ballots.
The commander-in-chief's pre-emptive claim to victory sparked a backlash from both conservative commentators and the Joe Biden campaign, which dubbed the speech "outrageous" and "unprecedented" before warning that it had its legal team on standby for any court battles ahead.
What follows below is a full transcript of Trump's election night "victory" speech from the White House.
President Donald Trump: This is without question the latest news conference I've ever had. I appreciate it very much, and I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support. Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight, and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won't stand for it. We will not stand for it.
I want to thank the first lady, my entire family, and Vice President Pence, Mrs. Pence for being with us all through this. And we were getting ready for a big celebration.
We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off. The results tonight have been phenomenal. And we are getting ready. I mean, literally, we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good. Such a vote, such a success. The citizens of this country have come out in record numbers. This is a record.
There's never been anything like it to support our incredible movement. We won states that we weren't expected to win in Florida, we didn't win it. We won it by a lot. We won the great state of Ohio, we won Texas. We won Texas by 700,000 votes and they don't even include it in the tabulations. It's also clear we have won Georgia. We're up by 2.5 percent, or 117,000 votes with only 7 percent left. They're never going to catch us, they can't catch us.
Likewise, we've clearly won North Carolina, where we're up 1.4 percent. We're 77,000 votes with approximately 5 percent left, they can't catch us. Also if you look and you see Arizona, we have a lot of life in that and somebody said, somebody declared that it was a victory—and maybe it will be, certainly that's possible—but certainly there were a lot of votes out there that we could get, because we're now just getting into what they call Trump territory. I don't know what you call it, but these were friendly Trump voters, and that could be overturned.
The gentleman that called it, I watched tonight, he said well we think it's fairly unlikely that we could catch. Well fairly unlikely? And we don't even need it, we don't need that. That was just a state that if we would've gotten it would have been nice, Arizona. But there's a possibility, maybe even a good possibility. In fact, since I saw that originally it's been changed and the numbers have substantially come down, just a small amount of votes. So we want that obviously to stay in play.
But most importantly, we're winning Pennsylvania by a tremendous amount of votes. We're up 600—think of this, think of this—we're up 690,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 690,000. These aren't even close, this is not like oh it's close. With 64 percent of the vote in, it's going to be almost impossible to catch, and we're coming into good Pennsylvania areas where they happen to like your president. So we'll probably expand that.
We're winning Michigan. I tell you, I looked at the numbers I said woah, I said wow, that's a lot. By almost 300,000 votes and 65 percent of the vote is in, and we're winning Wisconsin. I said we don't need all of them, because when you add Texas in, which wasn't added. I spoke with the really wonderful governor of Texas just a little while ago, and Greg Abbott he said congratulations. He called me to congratulate me on winning Texas. I mean we won Texas, I don't think they finished quite the tabulation, but there's no way. And it was almost complete but he congratulated me.
And he said by the way, what's going on? I've never seen anything like this. Can I tell you what? Nobody has. So we won by 107,000 votes with 81 percent of the vote, that's Michigan. So when you take those three states in particular, and you take all of the others, I mean we have so many. We had such a big night. You just take a look at all of these states that we've won tonight, and then you take a look at the kind of margins that we've won them by, and all of a sudden, it's not like we're up 12 votes and we have 60 percent left.
We won states and all of a sudden, I said what happened to the election? It's off. And we have all these announcers saying what happened, and then they said oh, because you know what happened? They knew they couldn't win, so they said, let's go to court, and did I predict this Newt? Did I say this? I've been saying this from the day I heard they were going to send out tens of millions of ballots. I said exactly— because either they were going to win, or if they didn't win they'll take us to court.
So, Florida was a tremendous victory, 377,000. Texas as we said. Ohio, think of this. Ohio, a tremendous state, a big state, I love Ohio, we won by 8.1 percent, 461,000. Think of it, almost 500,000 votes. North Carolina, big victory with North Carolina. And so we won there, we lead by 76,000 votes with almost nothing left. And all of a sudden everything just stopped.
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election, frankly we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation, this is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in the proper manner.
So we will be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list. OK? It's a very sad, it's a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this, and as far as I'm concerned, we already have won it.
So I just want to thank you, and I want to thank all of our support. I want to thank all of the people that worked with us, and Mr. Vice President, say a few words please.
