Biden-Harris won the 2020 election. The good news is that over 78 million people voted for Biden, and the Democratic ticked won at least 290 electoral college electors. The bad news is that over 72.7 million people voted for Trump. National polls were close to right about Biden’s 50.8 percent of the popular vote, but Trump’s 47.4 percent was five and a half percent more than his average 42 percent in the pre-election opinion polls. Democrats held their majority in the House but lost several seats. Republicans have 50 seats in the Senate, with January runoffs in Georgia will determine if they retain control.
No Resounding Repudiation
The hoped-for Blue Wave did not materialize. The terrifying reality is that even after four years in office, an openly racist delusional malignant narcissist demagogue ‘President’ increased his popular vote. This is particularly astounding given Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People
November 10, 2020
“At some basic level, Americans do seem to agree that the coronavirus is a major threat. Despite attempts to politicize and divide us on the pandemic, we are at least united in anxiety. In September, a survey of almost 4,000 Americans found that only 12 percent disagreed with requiring masks in public. Fully 70 percent wanted the government to do more to protect people, and only 8 percent wanted it to do less.
Since then, though, the government under President Donald Trump has done less. The U.S. has suffered the most documented coronavirus deaths in the world, by far. The Trump administration has continued to downplay and ignore the virus as its spread has accelerated in almost every region of the country…
It may have been reasonable to expect, then, that the leadership vacuum at the core of these numbers would decide the presidential election. Polling indicated extensive support for former Vice President Joe Biden, which buoyed speculation that the vote tallies might amount to a decisive repudiation of Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus. The president has variously lied by his own admission, denied the severity of the disease, and promised false cures, all as the death toll shot into the hundreds of thousands.
Yet no repudiation came. Biden won decisively, but more than 70 million Americans still voted for Trump. That’s more than those who voted for him in the 2016 election…
The narratives and tactics Trump used to persuade people to trust him as a sole beacon of truth—amid a sea of corrupt, lying scientists and doctors—draw on those of cult leaders, self-proclaimed healers, and wellness charlatans as much as those of authoritarian demagogues. They have proved effective over centuries…
Nothing is novel about the effectiveness of Trump’s approach. Scrutinizing and understanding its universal elements may help mitigate its damage as the pandemic continues…
If the nation’s public-health and scientific communities assume that the appeal of a quack was some transient aberration—something that will end when Trump is out of office, and that can be remedied with yet more facts—then the Biden administration will fail to reach millions of Americans, no matter how soundly it recites statistics. Its warnings and mandates will go unheeded and become fodder for charismatic outsiders who tell people what they want to hear.
There are ways to serve as a confident, optimistic leader without making up nonsensical promises. Hope can be conferred with promises to take care of people, and to be there for them. Reassurance can be offered by guaranteeing that no one will go into debt because they had to go to the hospital, and that people will have paid sick leave and job security so they can stay at home when necessary. If the public-health community does not do more to give people hope and reassurance in the face of this disaster, it will see people defect to those who will—even when they know the promises are too good to be true.”
Trump will never concede
Trump continues to refuse to concede and mount a delusional campaign to delegitimize the election result. He has already lost several ludicrous legal challenges and will continue to lose them. His dream of a Supreme Court packed with three of his confirmed Justices somehow reversing the election result will not be realized.
Republicans in office and his lunatic Trump Cult base continue to echo Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. His administration refuses to release transition funds and the White House has directed that no one in the administration do anything to support the transition.
Almost eighty percent of Americans already accept the result of the election. Once Trump’s legal challenges are all set aside, and the election results are certified by the States, Republican House and Senate members will have to acknowledge that Trump lost. He may never concede, but his administration will eventually be forced to cooperate with the transition.
A Lasting Dangerous Legacy
Trump’s desperate attempt to cling to power and scorched earth attempts to de-legitimize the election result will damage the Nation. We will prevail and on January 20, his reign will end as Biden is sworn in as President. But the most dangerous lasting effect of the last four years is that Trump has accelerated the rising authoritarianism of the Republican Party.
November 12, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST
“Taking a cue from President Trump, several leading Republican lawmakers and officials have refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential contest and indulge Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud…
It’s the latest sign of the party’s lurch away from democratic ideals and practices, a shift that predates Trump but one that has accelerated precipitously since. Now, according to data released by an international team of political scientists just before the Nov. 3 election, it’s possible to quantify the extent to which the Republican Party no longer adheres to such principles as the commitment to free and fair elections with multiple parties, the respectful treatment of political opponents and the avoidance of violent rhetoric.
‘The Republican Party in the U.S. has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years,’ said Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a former member of the German parliament. ‘Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.’ …
The drivers of the Republican Party’s drift toward authoritarianism are visible in the sub-indicators that make up the main index. Consider the demonization of political opponents…
By 2016, that sort of rhetoric had become the norm among GOP leaders…
Encouraging violence has become alarmingly common. From the 1970s through roughly 2010, V-Dem’s experts note that both Republican and Democratic leaders consistently rejected the use of violence against political opponents. For Republicans, that began to change under Trump…
‘That leading Republicans are not willing to defend the electoral process shows that Trump is not the only GOP politician who has a problem with key democratic norms,’ Lührmann said.”
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