A journalist yelled at Donald Trump to ask whether he was being a sore loser as the President walked out of a White House press conference on Friday without taking questions.Mr Trump, in his first public appearance in a week, announced new pharmaceutical pricing plans before again diverting to the election, insisting he “won”.
“Big pharma ran million dollars of negative advertisements against me during the campaign – which I won, by the way, but you know, we’ll find that out,” Mr Trump said.
As he exited the briefing room without taking questions, the reporter, believed to be CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, yelled, “Mr President, are you being a sore loser?”
Further back in the room, Brian Karem from Playboy yelled, “You lost the election! When will you admit you lost the election? When will you admit you lost the election?”
Mr Trump has not taken any questions from reporters since before the election.
Vice President Mike Pence faced similar heckling from the press after leaving a COVID-19 briefing without taking questions on Thursday.
It came as the President continued to claim that a path to victory remained viable.
But logic dictates his days in the White House are numbered, with key states that sealed presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’s win rapidly approaching deadlines to certify their election results.
Georgia on Friday became the first of them to formally certify its results, affirming that Mr Biden won in the southern state by 12,670 votes, or 0.26 per cent, a bitter blow to Mr Trump’s efforts to block the count.
“Numbers don’t lie,” said Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia. “The numbers reflect the verdict of the people.”
Mr Trump had criticised the recount as “meaningless” due to the lack of signature verification.
He had earlier insisted on Twitter that if Georgia let him “expose hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots”, it would give him “a BIG VICTORY” in the state.
The electoral college meets in each state on December 14 to formally vote on the winner.
The President spent most of the day hunkered down in the White House, fuming about the “rigged election” and retweeting conservative personalities, arguing that his rival’s victory was fraudulent.
Retiring Senator Lamar Alexander became the latest Republican lawmaker seeking to nudge Mr Trump into triggering a formal transition process.
Mr Biden “has a very good chance” of becoming the next president, Mr Alexander said, and should be afforded “all” resources necessary for a smooth transfer of power.
Despite Mr Trump’s election denial, Mr Biden is fully preparing to take over on January 20.
On Friday – his 78th birthday – he huddled in Wilmington, Delaware with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the top Democrats in Congress, telling them there is “a lot of work to do”.
Meanwhile at the White House, Mr Trump took the unprecedented step of hosting legislative leaders from Michigan, where he seeks to block the state from certifying the results which handed Mr Biden a 155,000-vote victory.
The move infuriated state Democrats, with Congresswoman Debbie Dingell accusing the Republican lawmakers of trying “to subvert our democracy”.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney launched an attack on Mr Trump for pressuring local officials, saying, “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”
Republican senators Ben Sasse and Joni Ernst also slammed the tactics. Mr Trump’s legal team fights on, however.
Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers hosted a wild press conference Thursday to lay out unproven allegations that Democratic “crooks” committed widespread fraud to deny Mr Trump re-election.