What This Victory Means
The U.S. presidential election was only just last month, and yet it feels like something that happened well over a year ago. Perhaps this is just due to how COVID and quarantine have impacted the way we experience the passage of time these days, but it is more likely that this discrepancy is thanks to the absolute whirlwind of a news cycle we have had in the weeks since it happened.
What is, or should be, the major story here? I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out how to even begin to frame my thoughts that have sputtered forth from this absolutely tumultuous tempest of a month. Even the headline “Biden defeats Trump” seems far too simplistic to accurately convey what actually went on here. That was the outcome, thankfully, but it’s worth reminding ourselves of the chaos it took for us to get here.
We always knew that election night would not close with a clear winner being declared. Election officials had been telling us this for months in advance, and simple common sense would dictate that the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots coupled with the stresses placed upon our systems by the COVID-19 pandemic would require elongated periods of vote counting in order to compensate. Still, news agencies do as news agencies do, and they did their best to keep the public informed of vote totals as they came in on election night, and preliminary results weren’t necessarily looking all that positive for Joe Biden. It was clear that the overwhelming “blue wave” that had been projected wasn’t meant to be, as Trump claimed the states of Florida and Texas and maintained strong leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; all three of which are states that Biden campaigned heavily in and were crucial to his path to victory, especially now that the swing state of Florida was out of play. Mail-in ballots skewed hard in favor of the Democratic party, but as they would require more time to be added to the vote count totals it was unclear if or when Biden would start to eat into Trump’s lead. Still, it remained a strong possibility that could only be proven or disproven once every last vote was counted. Biden himself urged patience to his supporters in a brief election night speech given in Wilmington, Delaware, stating that though he believed he was on track to win this election it was neither his place nor that of Donald Trump to declare victory before vote counts had been finalized.
And yet it was impossible not to become enraptured in the reality show aspect of the election when, just after 2 A.M. on November 4, Trump publicly declared himself the winner and stated his intent to go before the U.S. Supreme Court as he believed Biden’s incoming votes were fraudulent. Such a thing would be the absolute worst nightmare scenario; an authoritarian president using the power of the highest judicial body in the country—a body which he had a hand in seating 3 of its nine judges, no less—to overturn the legitimate results of an election when the voters showed their support to his opponent. While that case before the Supreme Court has yet to happen, and likely won’t, Trump has still yet to officially concede the election to Biden, his legal team has filed more than 30 separate lawsuits targeting swing states such as Georgia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and Trump continues to use his platform to perpetuate dangerously unfounded conspiracy theories that cast doubt on the legitimacy of this election.
There is so much to unpack here, and that is something we will have to do at a later date, but it’s worth recognizing that all of this together serves as a lesson in how the so-called “peaceful transition of power” has relied on the strength of commonly accepted norms. Trump has always been one to buck the norms of our federal government, but we’ve seen in real time the very tangible damage that Trump being Trump has done here. His refusal to concede the election to Biden meant that General Services Administrator Emily Murphy did not formally initiate the transition of power for three weeks, and that meant that Biden’s team could not officially coordinate with federal agencies when it came to issues such as the U.S. coronavirus response. The Trump administration not only abdicated any authority by walking away from potential stimulus discussions and refusing to enforce contact tracing efforts or mask mandates in the face of a pandemic with a total number of deaths in the U.S. that have skyrocketed to 280,000, but they have also spitefully hobbled the incoming administration’s efforts to get a handle on the situation before even officially taking office. In addition, the Trump team’s implications that Biden’s wins are chalked up to everything from fraudulent late-night dumps to system errors orchestrated by foreign governments have deeply widened not only the divide between left and right in this country, but also the divide between truth and lies. Multiple election officials, including most recently a Dominion Voting Systems technician operating in Georgia, have received death threats from disgruntled Trump supporters. And when social media sites like Twitter and Facebook attempt to get a handle on absolutely rampant streams of misinformation, these same perpetuators of anti-election rhetoric simply move to alternative platforms like Parler, where they can continue to form echo chambers of conspiratorial rhetoric without fear of facts.
So while it is an almost certainty that the electoral college will vote to affirm Biden’s win, and he will be seated as the 46th U.S. president come January, the seeds of doubt and division that Trump has sewn as a parting gift will be something that we as a country will have to reckon with going forward. And while we have every right to be exuberant over the victory of Joe Biden, it is worth tempering this joy with the sobering reminder of what kind of country we actually are. Because while over 81 million Americans voted to end the chaos and corruption of the Trump administration, over 74 million Americans still voted in support of it. That makes Trump the recipient of the second-greatest popular vote count in U.S. history. Despite all the lies, the conflicts of interest, the racism and the bigotry, the belligerence in both foreign and domestic affairs, the political incompetence, the nepotism, the presidential pardons for corrupt officials, and the firing of those who dared to challenge him, Trump still remains incredibly popular in the Republican Party. Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but the country as a whole failed to rebuke Trumpism as a movement.
The Republican Party has embraced fascism. We saw it when Tom Cotton advocated for the deployment of the U.S. military against American demonstrators in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. We see it now when senators such as Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham fail to check Trump’s worst impulses and support his lies about the election and his blatant efforts to remain in power despite the will of the American people. And we see it when former Trump advisor Michael Flynn, a man who had just received a presidential pardon from Trump, immediately advocates for a suspension of the Constitution and a declaration of martial law.
It is against the health of this nation that anyone who stood with Trump before, during, and after the 2020 election should ever see power again. Because while Trump has often been kept in check by the barriers of his own incompetence, it does not take a visionary to draw a frightening picture of the damage an actually competent authoritarian could do to our democracy. And because our system does not allow for the president to be elected by the popular vote alone, there are multiple paths to victory for someone even worse than Trump, and we can’t simply wait for that individual to emerge from the shadows as the next dark horse on the Republican ticket. 74 million American citizens had no issue with Trump even after four years of seeing exactly who he was, and simply being reactionaries to the next Trump may very well prove to be a losing strategy.
There are possible remedies going forward. We could extend citizenship to D.C. and Puerto Rico. We could simply do away with the electoral college and hope the majority of the U.S. population continues to choose sanity over lunacy. Or we could redouble our efforts to turn red states blue and keep them blue with targeted socio-economic developments. But we must do something.
What does this victory mean? It means that we avoided four additional years of irrevocable damage to our country, but 81 million votes to 74 million is still far too close for comfort. So for now, we breathe a sigh of relief and let the antiquated blowhard who plays at dictator tire himself out before he is inevitably swept out by the waves of change. We will welcome his replacement with open arms, and we will celebrate his victory together. Because yes, this is a victory.
We won.
But we must continue to win, and that means continuing to work. No going back to political apathy, no more pretending that the norm-breaking antics of Trumpism are in any way normal. We must take the pillars of democracy that Trump has so gleefully weakened over the past four years and reinforce them, even in the face of his supporters who still retain positions of power. We must acknowledge what kind of country we are before we can work to move forward toward the country we want to be. And, hopefully, that country will be one that will never again flirt with placating a man who saw the institutions of democracy as an inconvenience above all else.