“Tomorrow is the beginning of a new day,” Joe Biden said in his final campaign rally in Pittsburgh on the eve of the US election. “There’s one more day to show who we are as a country: looking out for each other, the thousand acts of kindness, the decency that people used to show one another – and still do.”
Three days later, Donald Trump appeared in the press briefing room of the White House and let the world know what he thinks of kindness and decency. With votes still being counted, he laid out a paranoid fantasy of a vast leftwing conspiracy stealing the election from him, one fraudulent ballot at a time.
For the media networks who cut away from Trump’s speech after just a few minutes, it was all too easy to dismiss his lie-infested rant as the death rattle of a man whose political lifeblood was being drained from him in real time. You could almost say his speech was irrelevant, given that no one is above the law and he doesn’t get to choose, no matter how charismatic he looks on TV.
Except for three inconvenient truths: Trump will continue to be head of state of the most powerful nation on Earth until at least 20 January; 70 million Americans voted for him, of whom a portion is likely to be susceptible to his falsehoods; some 17m guns have been bought so far this year – the largest number in US history.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
