Kenneth Copeland laughs maniacally at media for calling US election for Biden

Television evangelist who claimed Covid-19 would vanish with ‘wind of God’, mocks media and president-elect

The conservative televangelist Kenneth Copeland laughed uncontrollably over Joe Biden’s presidential win this weekend, and panned media outlets who declared him the winner over Donald Trump, who lost.    

In a 40-second-long video uploaded to the progressive Twitter account Right Wing Watch, the 83-year-old prosperity gospel preacher mocked both media outlets and Mr Biden, who became president elect on Saturday.

“The media said what?”, asked Mr Copeland. “The media said Joe Biden’s president,” he said, hysterically, as he addressed an audience at the Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska, on Sunday, who applauded.    

Speaking from a garden centre car park in Philadelphia when he heard Mr Biden had been declared the winner by multiple networks, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had similarly claimed that: “Networks don't get to decide elections, courts do”.

The Associated Press and other networks, who traditionally call winners in US elections, had projected Pennsylvania, the electoral college and so the presidency on Saturday, following almost four days of vote counting.

But supporters of the Republican president, including Mr Copeland and Mr Giuliani, have disputed the electoral process amid baseless claims that Democrats and officials had committed “fraud”.

The Trump campaign has so far refused to concede and claimed that legal challenges are pending, despite there being no evidence of alleged “fraud” in Tuesday’s presidential election.

Twitter users, meanwhile, mocked Mr Copeland, who was said to be “actually satan”, while another user said the pastor provided “Mass hysteria paired with furious denial”.

Mr Copeland, who has served on the Republican president’s evangelical advisory board, caused controversy in April when he claimed that the “wind of God” would blow the coronavirus pandemic away.

The virus has since infected more than 10 million Americans, and killed almost 240,000, with cases and hospitalisations on the rise.