President lauds Operation Warp Speed success but says New York will have to wait for vaccine

Hello and welcome to The Independent’s rolling coverage of Donald Trump’s administration 

First lady ‘counting every minute until he is out of office’ and planning divorce

With Donald Trump still refusing to concede the US presidential election to Joe Biden despite his defeat, the first lady is reportedly planning to leave her husband and end their 15-year marriage.

“Melania is counting every minute until he is out of office and she can divorce,” former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman told The Mail on Sunday, suggesting Mrs Trump would wait until January to save the president the “ultimate humiliation” of leaving his side while still in office and avoid any possible retaliation.

The first lady did come forward to break her silence on the election on Sunday, tweeting in support of her husband’s baseless accusations that the race was “stolen” by Democrats engaged in “voter fraud”, despite being unable to produce any evidence to substantiate the claim.

Louise Hall has the latest.

President’s ex-lawyer says he expects him to ‘flee’ White House

Michael Cohen, the leader’s estranged former personal attorney, has meanwhile said he “would not be shocked if there is no concession speech at all” from Trump and that he expects him not return to the White House from Mar-a-Lago after Christmas for Biden’s inauguration.

Speaking on MSNBC, Cohen said the president would probably fight the election result until the New Year and beyond from the comfort of his Florida retreat.

“I would not be shocked if there is no concession speech at all. My theory is that at Christmas time he goes to Mar-a-Lago. I think he will stay there through the inauguration. I would not be shocked if he will not show up to the inauguration either.

“He cannot let the camera look at him and basically pull down the curtain and see the wizard standing beside. He is just a loser and it is killing him and, right now, what is going on in the White House is nothing but finger-pointing.”

Justin Vallejo has more.

Trump still refusing to concede as Bush insists election ‘fair’

The defeated president, still deeply angry and in denial according to White House insiders, returned to the golf course in Virginia on Sunday to take out his frustrations on the green, as 43rd president George W Bush sent a shot across his bows by calling the election “fair”.

“The American people can have confidence that this election was fundamentally fair, its integrity will be upheld, and its outcome is clear,” Bush said in a statement intended to heap pressure on the incumbent to concede graciously.

John T Bennett has more on the wounded beast.

President confronted by people celebrating his defeat as motorcade rode back to White House

Located some 26 miles from the White House in the Virginia suburb of Stirling, Trump faced an interesting journey back to the executive mansion for the president yesterday - and there was no way a motorcade could shield him from public feeling regarding the election result.

Supporters of president-elect Biden lined the streets and highways between the golf course and downtown Washington, DC, waving flags and signs and making their distaste for the president evident.

Many gave the finger to Trump as the motorcade passed.

Oliver O’Connell has this report on scenes the president will probably claim not to have noticed, like the deafening boos that rang out when he went to pay his respects to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she lay in state at the Capitol.

Trump planning rallies to promote baseless ‘voter fraud’ conspiracy theories

While the likes of Cohen clearly relish the idea of this president retreating into the political wilderness to seethe in private, it doesn’t sound like we’ve heard the last of Trump just yet.

Instead, his temper tantrum tour is hitting the road, with the president reportedly planning to hold a series of campaign-like rallies in states across the country as he battles the electoral process in the courts.

These are likely to prove super-spreader events, as the coronavirus continues to rage across the nation with little reason for optimism until Joe Biden takes office.

The president plans to display alleged obituaries of deceased voters and claim ballots were cast in their names during the 2020 US elections, Axios reported on Sunday.

His false claims of mass voter fraud, particularly surrounding mail-in voting, nevertheless have no basis in fact or reality, according to a vast pool of data and research that has systematically proven mail-in voting to be safe from fraud and cheating.

A last-ditch effort the president made in Georgia and Pennsylvania to stop votes from being counted were tossed out by federal judges, as Twitter continued to censor statements he posted bearing false information about the election.

Chris Riotta has more from the Incredible Sulk.

Jared Kushner reportedly advising Trump to concede 

The president’s son-in-law - a real estate developer with no prior political experience who was hubristic enough to believe that claiming to have read 25 books on the Middle East was all he needed to bring peace to the region - is reportedly getting plenty of flack behind the scenes for his role in steering the failed re-election campaign in its latter stages.

Ivanka’s husband now has the unenviable task of trying to talk Trump into giving up a lost cause.

Justin Vallejo has more.

Trump spokesman caught sharing non-existent newspaper front-page on 2000 election result

They say desperate times call for desperate measures - and they don’t come much more desperate than this from the president’s campaign director, Tim Murtaugh.

In an attempt to undermine media projections of Joe Biden as the new president-elect over the weekend, Murtaugh tweeted a doctored front-page headline purporting to be from The Washington Times and bearing a splash headline that read "President Gore,” a reference to former vice president Al Gore’s race against George W Bush in 2000.  

Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee at the turn of the millennium, suffered the same fate at the polls as his 2016 counterpart Hillary Clinton, winning the popular vote but ultimately losing the race after a five-week legal battle with Bush over who had received Florida’s 29 Electoral College votes.

But no such front-page was ever produced by The Washington Times.

Namita Singh picks up the story.

Trump ‘voter fraud’ hotline inundated by prank calls

The president’s team have been putting out campaign emails over the weekend appealing for help that are so frantic they just come across as creepy.

They have also opened a hotline for “concerned citizens” to report their tip-offs of suspicious activities at the polls, only for the line to become jammed with nuisance prank calls, so much so in fact they have repeatedly been forced to change the number

The Lincoln Project and the “Tik-Tok youth” are certainly enjoying themselves.

Coronavirus pandemic will not end without leadership, says WHO chief as he congratulates Joe Biden

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), has had a pop at Trump as he welcomes the president-elect’s victory.

Joe Middleton has this report.