Donald Trump still believes he won the election

U.S. President Donald Trump publicly declared himself the winner of the presidential election Wednesday -- three weeks after the vote -- and called for it to be “turned around” while unleashing a litany of debunked theories and falsehoods as evidence of his victory.

“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,” Trump said.

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 Wednesday’s meeting 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”.  Every one of his justifications has been debunked and almost all of the lawsuits his legal team has filed have been tossed out of court.

The states Trump referenced Wednesday – 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.

A Pennsylvania judge issued an order halting any further Pennsylvania vote certification until a hearing on Friday in a case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans, separate to that of Trump’s campaign claims.