‘Start with a virus’: Trump suggests Covid-19 was invented to cost him the 2020 election

Continuing his bid to raise doubts over the election results, President Trump on Sunday retweeted a video containing several conspiracy theories around the 2020 race with a bizarre take on the origin of the coronavirus claiming it was engineered to tarnish his image.

The video posted by an anonymous account called @a17time which tweets in support of President Trump showcases a string of claims starting from the origin of Covid-19 and leading to the 2020 polling and the election results.

The video opens with the title in bold “How to steal an election” and voiceover says: "Start with a virus, import it into America, talk about it nonstop, call some governors, put patients into nursing homes, kill thousands, blame the president, keep blaming, blame some more," the narrator says, while shots of crowded hospitals and cemeteries play in the background.

"Lockdown small business [sic], kill the economy, push mail-in voting, stoke a race war, call for violence pick a candidate, no, not her," says the voiceover with the shots of Tulsi Gabbard and then moves to the shots of Joe Biden saying “yes, that’s more like him [sic],” while the music from "No Church in the Wild" by Kanye West and Jay-Z plays in the background.

The voiceover continues to make claims of the press “shielding” Mr Biden and not covering conservatives. “Ignore the economic recovery, downplay the world peace, pump the place,” says the voiceover.  

The video which is a little longer than a minute has received more than 370,000 views and has been retweeted over 20 thousand times. The social networking site was also quick to mark the video as “disputed” as with most of President Trump’s tweets containing unsubstantiated claims related to the election.

The video largely follows the line of what President Trump has been claiming so far including claims like widespread rigging, fraud with voting software and connivance of the media and “big tech guys,” and ends with the statement, “stealing the most powerful republic in the world... it's that easy.”

However, most of these claims have been debunked by the authorities and independent fact-checkers who continue to maintain that the US elections were carried out in a fair manner without any foreign interference. Most of Mr Trump’s lawsuits with similar allegations have either been withdrawn or rejected by the courts and the results have been officially certified.