Kushner, Melania advice Trump to accept election loss

Online Desk: US President Donald Trump claps alongside US First Lady Melania Trump after speaking during election night in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, early on November 4, 2020. AFP photo

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and first lady Melania Trump advised him to come to terms with president-elect Joe Biden’s victory while his adult sons pressed him and allies to keep fighting, reports CNN.

Kushner has approached him to concede, two sources told CNN. The first lady, according to a separate source familiar with the conversations, had privately said that the time had come for him to accept the election loss.

Meanwhile, Trump’s two adult sons, Donald Jr and Eric, had urged allies to continue pressing on and they had pushed Republicans and supporters to publicly reject the results even as CNN and other news organisations projected the race for Biden on Saturday.

Trump’s campaign is planning a messaging blitz to fuel its argument — unsupported by any evidence to date — that the president’s second term is being stolen from him through corrupt vote counts in battleground states, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN on Sunday evening.

One of the ways it plans to do that is presenting obituaries of people the campaign will claim voted in the election and considering having campaign style rallies to amplify the message, according to two of the sources.

The goal of the effort was to raise enough doubt about the results that secretaries of state in battlegrounds feel pressured to open investigations or call on their own for recounts – something that would prolong the process and potentially give the campaign more time to advance its litigation through the courts.

A previous fact check by CNN of claims by a handful of prominent Republicans, such as members of Trump’s family and supporters like former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell, of dead people voting in Michigan fell apart under scrutiny.

A CNN analysis of the claim and the purported backing for it did not find a single instance of that happening.

The president, who was at his golf course in Sterling, Virginia, on Saturday when the race was called, has not denied the outcome of the election privately even as he does so publicly, sources told CNN. But he had continued to push his attorneys to pursue legal challenges that would delay formal certification of the results, and he had made no public indication that he was ready to accept the results of the election.

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller in a tweet Sunday morning denied that Kushner had approached Trump, although CNN stood by its reporting. ‘This story is not true,’ said Miller, adding,‘Jared has advised @realDonaldTrump to pursue all available legal remedies to ensure accuracy.’

Trump asserted in a statement from his campaign — moments after CNN and other networks projected that Biden will become the 46th president of the United States — that Biden was ‘rushing to falsely pose as the winner’ and that the race was ‘far from over.’

‘I will not rest until the American people have the honest vote count they deserve and that democracy demands,’ Trump said in the statement, which explained that the campaign’s legal battle will begin Monday.