President Donald Trump’s motorcade was just pulling into his private golf club in suburban Virginia on Saturday morning (Sunday AEDT) when news organisations ended days of waiting and declared he had lost the presidency to Joe Biden.

Aides called Trump to let him know their predictions over the past several days had come true: every major news outlet had projected Biden to be the winner. But the President, who an hour earlier had said on Twitter that “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!”, was not surprised, they said. And he did not change his plans to go ahead with legal challenges to the election results that several of his own advisers warned him were long shots at best, or to play golf.