Trump encourages Oz to declare victory while votes still being counted

In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform Wednesday morning, Donald Trump encouraged Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to "declare victory" despite being deadlocked in a two-way contest with former hedge fund manager David McCormick. #CNN #News

71 comments

  1. They should just make it a serious crime for any candidate (or people associated with them) to declare victory before the official count is complete.

    1. @markdalbey If you lie to your spouse there’s a penalty.. When a child lies to a parent there’s a penalty. When an employee lies to management there’s a penalty. None of these things are against the law but there’s a price to be paid except in politics. The right to free speech is not a license to deceive.

    2. @Seymour ButtsYou do not get to pick and choose your rights. If you have freedom of speech you have to have freedom for all kinds of speech, even if you do not like it. With a few exceptions, that mostly revolve around violence and the right to “Life, Liberty, and Happiness” all speech is allowed, even lying. Do you think Trump would have hesitated to shoot protesters if protesting were not a form of speech? Do you think he would not have imprisoned people that criticized him if criticizing were not protected speech? Do you not think he would have sent his storm troopers into CNN to shut it down if the press were not protected by the 1st Amendment? Who is to decide what freedoms we have, the people with the guns? This is who decides in Russia. They are locking up protestors. You can’t say war. Opposition and members of the press die. There are things that people say that I don’t like. This is O.K. with me so the people that say things that I do like, get to say things that I like. Who says that the government allowing a person to lie is getting away with it? It is our responsibility to make sure that people who lie do not get away with it. It is not the government’s responsibility. It is our responsibility to those who fought and died for our freedoms, all freedoms, to make sure that we have those freedoms, even to lie.

  2. Trump on election night —> I won!!!!!
    Trump the next day —Im still ahead and winning!

    Trump a few days later —> REEEEEEE THE DEMS CHEATED!!

  3. I’m confused if a candidate can call his on election and declare victory.. what was the point in casting ballots?

  4. I’m glad Trump said this. It doesn’t really matter who his opponent is. If you won, you cheated. If I won, it was fair and square. The technical term for this is “sore loser”.

  5. LOL, declare victory before the votes is fully counted. Oz should stick to his TV shows and stay out of politics.

    1. We’ve seen that from both sides. I may not like Trump, but I doubt the Democrats are much better. These aren’t the 1990’s Democrats. These Democrats act like freedom of speech is a bad thing.

    1. @Saffron Wetter – This was largely due to a series of rulings from the presiding judge — as part of standard pre-trial litigation — about what evidence was permitted at trial. The judge ruled, for instance, that Durham’s team cannot suggest to the jury that the data provided to the FBI by Sussmann had been improperly obtained or used by Joffe, since prosecutors had failed to provide “sufficient evidence showing that Mr. Sussmann had concerns that the data was obtained inappropriately, or that he had any independent knowledge about the data collection beyond whatever he may have learned from Mr. Joffe through privileged communications.”

      Even more significantly, the judge curtailed Durham’s ability to present evidence on the question that seems to have driven the case from the start — in particular, whether, as Durham claimed in court filings, there was a wide-ranging conspiracy comprised of officials from the Clinton campaign, the campaign’s lawyers, Joffe, Fusion GPS and an assortment of IT professionals to prevent Trump’s election by “assembling and disseminating the [Alfa Bank] allegations and other derogatory information about Trump to the media and the U.S. government.”

      The court concluded that while Durham’s team had “proffered some evidence of a collective effort to disseminate the purported link between Trump and Alfa Bank to the press and others, the contours of this venture and its participants was not entirely obvious.” The judge went on to observe that it was far from clear “that the researchers — who were not employed by Mr. Joffe, Fusion GPS, or the Clinton Campaign, and most of whom never communicated with Mr. Sussmann — shared in this common goal,” and, as a result, ultimately held that *Durham had failed to justify what “essentially amounted to a second trial on a non-crime.”*

    2. @Saffron Wetter – The judge’s rulings were thoughtful and well-reasoned, which managed to obscure just how unusual it is for prosecutors to be so thoroughly constrained from presenting the case that they want. The thread that connected them was that the evidence that Durham’s team proffered over the course of pre-trial proceedings — concerning an allegedly broad, amorphous joint undertaking among an ill-defined network of loosely affiliated individuals spread throughout multiple organizations and institutions — was exceedingly thin, based on scattered bits and pieces of information.

      A strong conspiracy case usually involves the testimony of a key insider who can verify the government’s theory and narrate events from within the group — explaining how various, ostensibly distinct pieces of evidence fit into a coherent whole and how the disparate actions of participants served a singular objective. *Durham’s team, however, failed to persuade anyone to serve as this kind of witness.* As it is, the court seems to have conscientiously attempted to wade through a thicket of unusual and complex legal issues in order to focus the trial on what should have been at issue based on the crime that Durham actually charged — whether the alleged misrepresentation by Sussmann actually occurred and, if so, whether it had a material effect on the FBI, as Durham had claimed.

      Whatever the outcome of the trial, the possibility that political observers on the right will modify their preconceptions about Trump’s supposed victimization or the purportedly nefarious scheming of Clinton operatives seems increasingly remote. In fact, many of them seemed to have spent weeks positioning themselves for the possibility of an acquittal.

    3. @Saffron Wetter – After the court’s ruling on the conspiracy issue, the senior legal correspondent for the Federalist accused the judge of having “let politics trump the law” in an effort “to protect Democrats and Clinton,” who was “behind it all.” The Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Holman Jenkins wrote that Durham “hardly needs a conviction to have served his country by exposing the truth,” and his colleague, Kimberley Strassel, argued that *Durham had already accomplished the “far bigger goal” than convicting Sussmann — to “put every sleazy collusion player in the hot seat, with ramifications beyond the courtroom.”*

      *It is unlikely that political observers on the right will ever modify their preconceptions about the purportedly nefarious scheming of Clinton operatives.*

      Durham’s conspiracy theory — and I do not mean to use that term pejoratively, but that is what it is and will remain — will not be tested in court anytime soon, but the notion is likely to live on among conservatives regardless. *The result is particularly ironic since many of these same people vocally criticized the coverage of the Mueller investigation on the theory that the media was cherry-picking information and credulously accepting the claims of prosecutors and sympathetic pundits, but they have adopted the same methodology that they once railed against — a combination of pseudo-forensic readings of court filings and public documents, politically provocative narratives constructed from largely contextless scraps of information, and a strong, seemingly indestructible confirmation bias against their political adversaries.*

      Under the circumstances, Durham, in a perverse sense, already won that “second trial of a non-crime”. He won it in the court of conservative public opinion. *This may seem counterintuitive, since the judge’s decision to prevent him from airing his ambitious theory of a Clinton-orchestrated conspiracy should have diminished confidence in his work and in his various assertions. But instead, the notion that Durham has been improperly muzzled by a Democrat-appointed judge — however fallacious it may be — seems primed to have the opposite effect among many of his supporters.*

      Almost five years to the day since the start of the Mueller investigation itself, the views of political observers concerning the 2016 election and the Trump-Russia investigation seem impervious to change. For perhaps everyone but Sussmann himself, the verdict at his trial may be beside the point.

    4. @Just For Fun
      Okay thank you that’s a little different than what I heard today!
      I wish John Durham investigation would Finnish
      Like I said you don’t know who to believe,
      God bless!

  6. In a democracy, you don’t “find” votes. You calmly count all the votes. Every politician who clarifies this gets, at least, my vote of confidence.

    1. @floh440
      WOW..!!!!!…Thanks for letting me know..i had no idea that Obama was an insurrectionist…!!!!!…..😨

  7. “Oz, you gotta do what I did.
    Whether you’re winning or losing, but especially if you’re a loser like me, just declare victory before all of the votes are counted.
    That confuses the hell out of the poorly educated.”
    ~Dolt 45

  8. I still go back to watch Trump’s speech on election day declaring early victory.

    It’s still hilarious.

    1. Man you are right – If only there was a Department of the government that concerned itself with matters pertaining to , to ,,,,,, JUSTICE !!!! 😊………….😑

  9. I’m waiting with baited breath for Republicans to start tearing each other apart about ‘stealing’ their own primaries from each other🤣

    1. 😆 that was democrats 🤣 Bernie sanders an Hillary Clinton

      Pepperidge farms remembers

  10. “Truthsocial?” Republican party can’t even tell the truth if their life depended. Lol

    1. Quite amusingly, Trump can’t even pronounce the name of his own social media app. Several times at Trump’s rallies, he has stumbled and called it “Toth Sacha,” or something similar. The second word “Sacha” is kind of mumbled, so it difficult to suss out exactly what Trump says.

    2. Keep doing exactly this. We really appreciate you pushing fence-sitters, moderate Democrats, and Independents over to our side with your never-ending bloviating trash. We appreciate you! Keep up the good work!

  11. You know, they say that people should learn from their mistakes of others and do better. Unfortunately, Oz doesn’t seem to learn from what happened to Trump when he declared that he won the election, even before the results were in. Who knows, maybe he’ll do what Trump did and announce his “victory” during a campaign rally!

  12. On the other hand, declaring you won the race when it becomes abundantly clear you didn’t can make you quite the ignoramus. Of course being quite the ignoramus is something Donald Trump is well practiced at. … the voice of experience coaching Oz, as it were.

  13. Boy, I’m so innocent. I thought that the ballot count determines the winner, not the candidate. But, then again, who knows what the election rules are when Trump is making them up as he goes.

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