President Donald Trump has publicly declared himself the winner of the US presidential election and called for the “rigged” polls to be “turned around”.
“This was an election that we won easily. We won it by a lot,” he told a meeting of the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee by phone.
“This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen; we can’t let it happen for our country and this election has to be turned around because we won Pennsylvania by a lot, and we won all of these swing states by a lot.”
The president has been tweeting many of these claims since Election Day and especially since Joe Biden was declared president-elect on November 7th. But this was the first time he has spoken publicly about the results since his last post-election news conference on November 5th.
Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, were at the meeting held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which also featured various witnesses from across the state who claimed voter fraud and irregularities.
The president, who said he was calling from the Oval Office and was watching the proceedings on television, spoke for just over 11 minutes and outlined his reasons why he was convinced that the Democrats “cheated” and won a “fraudulent election”.
The states President Trump referenced – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin – have already certified their election results, except for Wisconsin, where two counties are undergoing a recount and no widespread irregularities have surfaced so far.
Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden, has urged Americans to stay at home during the Thanksgiving holiday amid a surge in coronavirus cases, while rebuking President Donald Trump’s continued challenge of the election results.
“This last election … we’ve seen record numbers of Americans exercise their sacred right, that of the vote, to register their will at the ballot box.
“In America we have full and fair and free elections. And then we honour the results. The people of this nation. The laws of the land won’t stand for anything else.”
Mr Biden called for unity in the face of the pandemic, warning that the US is in the midst of a “dramatic spike in cases” that could see health system overwhelmed.
“I know the country has grown weary at the fight. We need to remember. We’re at war with a virus, not with one another,” Biden said from Wilmington, Delaware, warning the country could soon start to see more than 200,000 new cases a day. There have been around 170,000 new cases reported each day recently.
“We owe it to the doctors and the nurses and the other front-line workers … who’ve risked their lives, some lost their lives, and put so much on the line in a heroic battle,” said Biden, who urged Americans not to gather in large groups and to wear masks.
“We owe that to our fellow citizens who need access to hospital beds care to fight this disease we owe it to one another. It’s literally our patriotic duty as Americans.”
Earlier, China’s President, Xi Jinping sent a message congratulating Mr Biden, more than two weeks after his victory was projected by US media.
However, a number of world leaders have still not reached out to the president-elect, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said that he would not offer congratulations until “the electoral process in the US ends.”
