Desperate Trump Supporters Held Sad 'Stop the Steal' Rallies Across the Country This Weekend

Trump supporters staged protests across the country on Saturday and falsely claimed voter fraud, as every major news organization across the country declared former Vice President Joe Biden the president-elect after winning Pennsylvania. 

The news that Biden had won hit while Trump fans, some of them armed, were rallying in Pennsylvania’s state capital of Harrisburg. They insisted the election was carried out unfairly and spewed conspiracy theories about why Biden took the lead in Pennsylvania after being down big on election night.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is not over,” GOP state Rep. Frank Ryan said after the race was called. 

The commanding lead Trump held in Pennsylvania on election night evaporated when counties began counting mail ballots, which they had been legally prohibited from doing before Tuesday. With nearly 1.2 million absentee votes counted, Biden had won nearly 80% of them, according to the New York Times as of Monday morning. Biden’s margin over Trump in the tipping point state had increased to 45,000 votes as of Monday morning. 

In Sacramento on Saturday, attendees of a “stop the steal” protest and counter-demonstrators clashed near the California state capitol. The driver of a van maced a Trump supporter, who then stuck his flag into the van’s open window, and at least one person was punched, according to Capital Public Radio. There were several other scuffles between Biden supporters and groups including Proud Boys, according to the Sacramento Bee, but no arrests were reported. 

In Lansing, Michigan, another state Biden flipped, and where he’s currently leading by 153,000 votes and counting, hundreds of pro-Trump protesters gathered with many of them claiming mail-in voting was tantamount to voter fraud.

“We're here to show our president we're with him,” one woman from Detroit told the Lansing State Journal. “There's 100% no chance he didn't win.”

Some fights also broke out between Trump supporters and counter-protesters in Lansing.

But so far, the protests don’t seem to have had much staying power, with much smaller protests happening Sunday. The following day in Lansing, opposing groups of protesters had a debate on Black Lives Matter, reportedly to prevent a repeat of the previous day’s clashes.

And on Sunday, the day after hundreds of people rallied in Harrisburg, roughly two dozen people showed up to keep the fight going, according to the Patriot-News. 

“We want in-person. We’re not going to accept paper ballots. We’re not going to accept mail-in,” Dominick Gildersleeve, a dairy farmer from New York who organized the protest, told the Patriot-News. “If we get that vote, in-person with national IDs, and then Biden is voted as president, at that point, we don’t have a leg to stand on. But we want a fair shot.”