A complete timeline of Trump's 'pathetic' first election speech in 48 hours
The US presidential election isn't over yet.
At the time of writing, neither Trump nor Biden have officially been declared the winner – but that hasn't stopped Trump from lashing out at his opponent, the Democrats and the voting system more generally in an attempt to save face as his re-election hopes are further and further dashed.
In a press conference that CNN's Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper variously described as "pathetic" and "like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun", Trump attempted to excuse his failings by insisting, without evidence, that the election was rigged against him.
Here's a complete timeline of all the unsubstantiated claims he made to try to support this lie from his podium at the White House.
1. Thousands of Americans voted illegally.
If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
This is the lie that's been months in the making.
Trump knew there was a chance he'd lose the election, so he started ranting about mail-in ballots and election fraud all across the campaign trail. He's failed to provide a single shred of evidence to support his extraordinary and oft-repeated claims, but he has very effectively created a get-out-of-jail free card for his own ego.
2. The pollsters were against him.
The pollsters got it knowingly wrong. We had polls that were so ridiculous and everyone knew it at the time. There was no blue wave that they predicted. They thought there was going to be a big blue wave. That was false, that was done for suppression reasons.
Everyone knows an election nerd whose passion for compiling up-to-date and accurate polling data instantly disproves this point. Pollsters want to predict what's going to happen, not influence any outcome.
3. People with "special interests" artificially inflated Biden's momentum.
Everyone now recognises media polling was election interference in the truest sense of that word by powerful special interests. These phoney polls, fake polls, were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr Biden and diminish Republicans' ability to raise funds. They're what's called suppression polls, everyone knows that now.
This particular attempt at saving face doesn't really make any sense.
For one, the polls generally predicted that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump by a greater margin than Biden would, and yet somehow he still managed to win.
4. The entire voting system is corrupt.
I've been talking about mail-in voting for a long time. It's really destroyed our system, it's a corrupt system. It makes people corrupt even if they aren't by nature.
Here Trump seems to confuse an election ballot with the one ring from The Lord of the Rings.
Mail-in votes don't corrupt people: or, at least, let's hope they don't, given that Trump has voted by mail multiple times himself.
5. The votes should only be counted fully in states where he's winning.
We're way up in Michigan, won the state. In Wisconsin we did likewise, fantastically well. And that got whittled down. Today we're on track to win Arizona ... so we'll see what happens.
In short: according to Trump, the vote in Michigan and Wisconsin was unfair because the states started to turn blue. But in Arizona, where there's still a chance it'll turn red, the vote is going just fine... it's funny how that works.
6. The Democrats rigged the vote in Pennsylvania against him.
This is a case where they're trying to steal an election. They're trying to rig an election, and we can't let that happen. Detroit and Philadelphia, known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily, cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race, a very important presidential race.
Once again, there is absolutely no evidence for this.
And by the way, the top election official in Georgia – which Trump described as "run by Democrats" – is a Republican.
7. He knows a thing or two about corruption.
For a long time, you've been writing about the corrupt Democrat machine. I went to school there and I know a lot about it. It hasn't changed, it's gotten worse.
This feels a lot like saying the quiet part out loud.
8. He's considering taking the election to the courts.
We think we will win the election very easily. We think there's going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence, so much proof. It's going to end up, perhaps at the highest court in the land, we'll see.
You'd think a man with "so much evidence, so much proof" would be able to share even a tiny bit of it.
9. The election's outcome can't be decided in the usual way (because he probably won't win).
As you know I've claimed certain states and he's claiming states, so we can both claim the states but ultimately I have a feeling judges are going to have to rule.
One of the journalists Trump ignored at the end of his speech put it best: he's simply being a "sore loser".
The world is still watching, streaming and frantically refreshing to find out who will be the next president of the United States.
The result hasn't been declared, but it seems that even Trump has – in a completely childish outburst – discounted himself.