President Trump appeared to briefly acknowledge for the first time on Sunday morning that former Vice-President Joseph R. Biden Jr had defeated him in the presidential election, but quickly reversed himself less than two hours later, insisting that “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go.”

The duelling tweets came as Trump continued to lie about the conduct of the vote-counting process, falsely insisting that Biden’s victory was the result of a “Rigged” election orchestrated by the “Fake & Silent” media.

His first tweet came on Sunday morning at 7.47. Referring to Biden, the President said that “he won”. That represented the first time Trump had publicly said what his advisers have been telling him for days privately: His re-election bid failed and Biden will be inaugurated on January 20.

After a flurry of tweets and news reports about his “concession,” Trump insisted that he had been misunderstood.

At 9.16, he insisted falsely: “RIGGED ELECTION. WE WILL WIN!” And three minutes later, he wrote that Biden “only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”

The rapid online flip-flop made it clear that Trump is still refusing to abandon the lies about the election being rigged and stolen that he has been spreading since Election Day, inflaming anger among his supporters about his defeat.

In the same tweet in which he appeared to acknowledge Biden’s victory, Trump claimed again that “all of the mechanical ‘glitches’ that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes.” Twitter quickly labelled almost all of Trump’s Sunday morning tweets “disputed”.

Trump’s online commentary followed a series of tweets on Saturday in which he egged on thousands of his supporters at a pro-Trump gathering in Washington with fake allegations about voter fraud as he continued to push legal challenges and deny that Biden was the President-elect.

“The hand recount taking place in Georgia is a waste of time,” Trump tweeted on Saturday afternoon, making false claims about election officials in that state where a recount had been called by Brad Raffensberger, a Republican and the state’s secretary of state. “They are not showing the matching signatures. Call off the recount until they allow the MATCH. Don’t let the Radical Left Dems STEAL THE ELECTION!”

After reports of some violent clashes between the President’s supporters in Washington and anti-Trump activists, Trump did not seek to calm tensions but instead lashed out, saying that “ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills,” and urged the police to move in aggressively.

“DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!” the President wrote.

It appears certain that the President’s initial Twitter acknowledgment of Biden’s victory was not an indication that he intends to offer a more formal concession any time in the near future. And there was no indication that his tweet would immediately cause the administrator of the General Services Administration to officially allow the Biden transition team to have access to money and information they are due.

Trump played golf at his Virginia club on Saturday. He had no public events on his official schedule for Sunday.

New York Times News Service