The moment was at once shocking and entirely foreseeable. With millions of votes uncounted, Donald Trump all but claimed victory against Joe Biden in the US presidential election on Wednesday. He also promised legal action to stop the count and called the normal workings of the electoral system a “fraud”. His intention was not just to prejudge the result but to taint a President Biden (if the Democrat is elected as such) as illegitimate.

He may yet succeed. On the available evidence, however, it is Mr Trump, not Mr Biden, who needs the vote-counting to continue. By Wednesday afternoon, he was behind in Wisconsin and other decisive states. If the Democrat has not scored the landslide that polls promised, he could become the 46th president of the republic regardless.

To deplore Mr Trump’s intervention, it is not necessary to deny his electoral resilience. A man who has outperformed expectations in Florida and Ohio may yet have the votes to win other swing states. But that is for Americans themselves to decide. A vast share of them voted through absentee ballots, a wholly legitimate method that is also common sense in a time of pandemic. In many states, they can arrive or be counted after polling day. To impugn these as somehow lesser votes is itself a breach of the democratic process and an affront to American democracy. A US leader should cheer what seems to be the highest turnout in a presidential election for over a century. This one seeks to artificially reduce it.