It is official now: Joe Biden has won the 2020 Presidential Election. In January of 2021, he will become the 46th President of the United States.
The results have been called by major news networks. Trump, through tweets, is still contesting the results, claiming that the election was not legitimate. However, he will likely now take the battle to the courts, and there is the question of him providing any meaningful evidence to back up his claims of foul play that resulted in fraudulent election results.
According to some news reports on television that I heard, Biden will seek out longtime Republican friends to try and stand by him, and thus, the validity of the election results.
That is probably a wise course of action.
Another thing that I feel he should do, and am guessing will do, is to start to announce his cabinet, much like George W. Bush did in 2000. It would be the ultimate way of showing symbolically that he and the country are ready to move on, even if Trump and his supporters angrily try and contest the election results with baseless claims that will likely not stand up in court, even a court handpicked by the Trump administration. Biden should go ahead and act like the President-elect, confirming this status and legitimacy, even as Trump whines and continues to panic and feel sorry for himself. Indeed, even as Trump tries to appeal to the courts, and especially while his supporters try to protest, perhaps even violently. This is a nation governed by the rule of law, and Biden's election win entitles him to succeed Donald Trump as the newly elected president. He will be the 46th President of the United States by late January.
As flawed as this country sure appears to be, and as many supporters as Trump seems to have, collectively, the country deserves to move on from this mess.
I believe that with Trump behind us there is a possibility of a relative return to normality. This packs some problems of it's own, of course, because it was this very situation in the country that passed as "normal" that laid the groundwork for Trump to rise, and divide the nation like no politician in modern history has before. But we certainly were not going to move ahead as a unified country with the most polarizing politician in modern history at the helm. And so, Biden's win offers a chance for us to at least begin to pick up the pieces and move on.
Let it be so.
For me, I feel contented that Joe Biden won. There was a point, particularly prior to March and the shutdown, and the obvious mishandling of the coronavirus crisis by the Trump administration, when I was almost certain that Trump was going to get a second term. Indeed, I even believed that he had won on election night itself, when the results did not seem promising. It sunk me into despair for the state of this country, and for what would happen in the next four years, with a newly emboldened President Trump feeling that he has a political mandate.
However, I was wrong, and cannot remember the last time ever being so happy to have been wrong. Donald Trump has hopefully been humbled, even just a little bit. He might whine and complain and protest and call foul, but I think deep down, he KNOWS that he lost. He lost the popular vote by more than four million, and he lost some of the key states - particularly Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania - that won him the presidency in 2016. He was a failure as president, and the country will be better off without him, better off to sweep him, his presidency, and everything that he stood for into the dustbin of history. Trump was an enormous and embarrassing national disgrace, and it will be great to put him in our collective rearviewmirror. Maybe Trumpism is not dead, and will not die simply because Trump lost this election. But at the very least, let their demagogue no longer be the sitting president. Hopefully, the media also stops giving him the kind of attention that made him an unavoidable figure in the past few years.
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