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Protest against Donald Trump in front of the White House
Photo: MICHAEL REYNOLDS / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
On Friday, US President Donald Trump again charged that "illegal votes" would be counted after the presidential election.
From the beginning he said that only "legal votes" should be considered for the result.
"But we have encountered opposition from the Democrats on this fundamental principle," Trump said in a written statement.
Since election night, Trump has asserted several times that there was electoral fraud without providing evidence.
Now the president has announced again that he will use all legal means.
Addressing the American people, he added, "I will never give up fighting for you and our nation."
Trump's chances of staying in office have plummeted.
Democrat Joe Biden leads the way in four out of five states that haven't finished counting votes.
A win in Pennsylvania would be enough for the challenger to win the election.
On Friday, the head of the legal department on Trump's campaign team, Matt Morgan, said: "This election is not over."
Biden’s predictions of election victories in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona are based on results that are far from complete.
"Once the election is over, President Trump will be re-elected."
Trump's son Donald Junior had already called on his father on Thursday to open a "total war" around the election.
The president must "expose all the fraud and cheating".
This included the votes of voters who were dead or no longer lived in the respective state, claimed the Trump son.
"It is time to clean up this mess and stop looking like a banana republic."
Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who lost to Barack Obama in the 2012 White House race, sharply criticized Trump for the fraud allegations.
The President is wrong "when he says that the election was falsified, flawed and stolen".
Such a claim harms "the cause of freedom here and around the world."
The Republican Senator Ben Sasse called on Twitter to ignore "overheated rhetoric", to wait for the vote to be counted and to trust the rule of law.
The TV channel CNN reported, with reference to anonymous sources in the White House, that high-ranking officials were distancing themselves from Trump in view of the expected defeat.
"It's over," said an adviser to the president.
Another advisor said Trump was internally isolated because of the fraud allegations.
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sms / dpa / Reuters