Trump Slammed for Baseless Claims About Fraudulent Ballots: 'If You Count the Legal Votes, I Easily Win'

As he stares down defeat, Donald Trump sowed doubt in American democracy by questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election results.

The president reiterated baseless claims during a Thursday night speech from the White House, accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election through fraudulent ballots.

"If you count the legal votes I easily win," he said. "If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us."

Trump went on to list some of his campaign's success and criticized previous polls that indicated a "blue wave" was coming. He suggested the pollsters intentionally misled the public in an effort to discourage Republican turnout. 

"The pollsters got it knowingly wrong, they got it wrong," he continued, before highlighting the GOP wins in the House and Senate. "They thought there was going to be a big blue wave. That was false. It was done for suppression reasons but instead, there was a big red wave, and it has been properly acknowledged by the media, they were, I think, very impressed but that’s after the fact."

Trump is currently trailing Joe Biden in Electoral College votes, and is losing his lead in key battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania. The president also questioned why his Democratic opponent has been overwhelmingly winning absentee ballots, seemingly forgetting his months-long attack on mail-in voting.

"We were winning in all the key locations, by a lot actually, and then our numbers started getting miraculously whittled away in secret and they wouldn't allow legally permissible observers." Trump said, referring to the chaos at a Michigan ballot counting site. "... There's been a lot of shenanigans and we can't stand for that in our country."

CBS News' Weijia Jiang later reported the disturbing development that Trump does not plan to concede if Biden ends up winning the election. 

Twitter users had strong reactions to Trump's desperate attempt to delay his likely loss. Some slammed him for failing to provide any evidence of his claims, while others simply dismissed the speech as a "sad" and "pathetic" display of a "sore loser."

You can read some of the reactions below.