WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump flooded his first postelection political rally with debunked conspiracy theories and audacious falsehoods Saturday as he claimed victory in an election he decisively lost.
A sampling from his remarks in Valdosta, Georgia:
TRUMP: "If I lost, I'd be a very gracious loser."
THE FACTS: There's no "if." He lost, refuses to concede, hasn't congratulated the winner and persists in allegations of election malfeasance that courts and officials across the breadth of battleground states and in Washington have found meritless.
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TRUMP, trying to cast suspicion on the more than 80 million votes recorded for President-elect Joe Biden: "When he made a Thanksgiving Day speech on the internet, they say he had less than a thousand people. ... How do you have 80 million votes if you have less than a thousand people?"
THE FACTS: This is a grossly false tally and one example among many of Trump grasping at the thinnest of straws. Millions of people watched Biden's Thanksgiving remarks.
The bogus claim that fewer than 1,000 watched appears to have grown from a screenshot someone posted on Twitter showing the number of viewers at one point tuned into a single live stream of the speech. But Biden's Thanksgiving address a day before the holiday streamed live on multiple major media sites — each with its own viewer count — and netted more than 1 million online views over the first few days, as measured by just a sampling of sites.
