US President Donald Trump says he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for president-elect Joe Biden.

In the nearest he has come to a concession, Mr Trump said on Thursday (local time) if Mr Biden is certified the election winner by the Electoral College he will depart the White House.

Mr Biden is due to be inaugurated on January 20.

The Electoral College is due to meet on December 14.

Asked if he would leave the White House if the college vote went against him, Mr Trump said: “Certainly I will. And you know that.

“If they do, they made a mistake.”

Mr Trump made the comments at the White House after speaking to US troops during the traditional Thanksgiving Day address to US service members.

Mr Trump also snapped at a reporter objecting to his false claims about the election.

“You’re just a lightweight. Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the President of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the President that way,” he said, pointing his finger at the reporter.

Tweet from @PoliticusSarah

Mr Biden won the November 3 presidential election with 306 Electoral College votes – many more than the 270 required – to Trump’s 232.

Mr Biden also leads Mr Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally.

Mr Trump’s hint at accepting the election result hasn’t stopped his stream of tweets calling into the question the vote-counting process.

He has renewed baseless claims that “massive fraud” in battleground states led to his election defeat, indicating he’ll go to Georgia to rally supporters ahead of two Senate run-off elections.

“This has a long way to go,” Mr Trump said.

“This election was a fraud. It was a rigged election.”

Mr Trump spoke with US military leaders overseas on Thursday.

After his conversation, Mr Trump took questions for the first time since election day and angrily denounced officials in Georgia and Pennsylvania, two key swing states that helped give Biden the win, as “enemies of the state” and claimed they were culprits in vote fraud.

State officials and international observers have repeatedly said no evidence of mass fraud exists.

Mr Trump said he would hold a rally with thousands of supporters in Georgia on Saturday to support Republican senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler whose January 5 run-off elections will determine which party controls the Senate.

Tweet from @realDonaldTrump

Mr Trump’s attempt to overturn the election result through a series of challenges in the courts have met with failure.

Mr Biden was certified on Wednesday as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania and Nevada, ending three weeks of vote counting and a string of failed legal challenges there by Donald Trump’s campaign team.

Pennsylvania officials asked a federal appeals court Tuesday to put an end to the Mr Trump campaign’s legal challenge of an election that has now been certified, and in their view, resolved.

More than two dozen rulings have gone against Mr Trump to date, and Democrats believe that one of the few remaining doors for the President to contest the 2020 presidential contest has been shut following the court’s decision.

-with agencies