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      How can Biden heal America when Trump doesn’t want it healed? | Robert Reich

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      It’s over. Donald Trump is history.
      For millions of Americans – a majority, by almost 5m popular votes – it’s a time for celebration and relief. Trump’s cruelty, vindictiveness, non-stop lies, corruption, rejection of science, chaotic incompetence and gross narcissism brought out the worst in America. He tested the limits of American decency and democracy. He is the closest we have come to a dictator.
      Democracy has had a reprieve, a stay of execution. We have another chance to preserve it, and restore what’s good about America.
      It will not be easy. The social fabric is deeply torn. Joe Biden will inherit a pandemic far worse than it would have been had Trump not played it down and refused to take responsibility for containing it, and an economic crisis exacting an unnecessary toll.
      The worst legacy of Trump’s term of office is a bitterly divided America.
      Judging by the number of ballots cast in the election, Trump’s base of support is roughly 70 million. They were angry even before the election (as were Biden supporters). Now, presumably, they are angrier.
      The nation was already divided when Trump became president – by race and ethnicity, region, education, national origin, religion and class. But he exploited these divisions to advance himself. He didn’t just pour salt into our wounds. He planted grenades in them.
      It is a vile legacy. Although Americans have strongly disagreed over what we want the government to do, we at least agreed to be bound by its decisions. This meta-agreement required enough social trust for us to regard the views and interests of those we disagree with as equally worthy of consideration as our own. But Trump continuously sacrificed that trust to feed his own monstrous ego.
      Elections usually end with losing candidates congratulating winners and graciously accepting defeat, thereby demonstrating their commitment to the democratic system over the particular outcome they fought to achieve.
      But there will be no graciousness from Trump, nor a concession. He is incapable of either.
      He will be president for another two and a half months. He is still charging that the election was stolen from him, mounting legal challenges and demanding recounts, maneuvers that could prevent states from meeting the legal deadline of 8 December for choosing electors.
      If he continues, America could find itself in a situation similar to what it faced in 1876, when claims about ballot fraud forced a special electoral commission to decide the winner, just two days before the inauguration.
      I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump refuses to attend Biden’s inauguration and stages a giant rally instead.
      He’ll send firestorms of aggrieved messages to his followers – questioning Biden’s legitimacy and urging that they refuse to recognize his presidency. This will be followed by months of rallies and tweets containing even more outlandish charges: plots against Trump and America by Biden, Nancy Pelosi, “deep-state” bureaucrats, “socialists”, immigrants, Muslims, or any other of his standard foes.
      It could go on for years, Trump keeping the nation’s attention, remaining the center of controversy and divisiveness, sustaining his followers in perpetual fury, titillating them with the possibility he might run again in 2024, making it harder for Biden to do any of the national healing he’s promised and the nation so desperately needs.
      How can Biden heal the nation when Trump doesn’t want it healed?
      The media (including Twitter, Facebook, and even Fox News) could help. They have begun to call out Trump’s lies in real time and cut off his press conferences, practices that should have started years ago. Let’s hope they continue to tag his lies and otherwise ignore him – a fitting end to a reality TV president who tried to turn America into a reality warzone.
      But the responsibility for healing America falls to all of us.
      For starters, we’d do well to recognize and honor the selflessness we have observed during this trying time – starting with tens of thousands of election workers who have worked long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous circumstances.
      Add to them the hospital workers across the nation saving lives from the scourge of Covid-19; the thousands of firefighters in the west and the emergency responders on the Gulf coast battling the consequences of climate change; the civil servants getting unemployment checks out to millions of jobless Americans; social workers dealing with family crises in the wake of evictions and other hardships; armies of volunteers doling out food from soup kitchens.
      These are the true heroes of America. They embody the decency of this land. They are doing the healing, rebuilding trust, reminding us who we are and who we are not.
      Donald Trump is not America.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US More

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      in Elections

      'It's not over': Trump supporters protest Biden victory in swing states

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      As word came on Saturday that the election had been called for Joe Biden, hundreds of supporters of the defeated president began amassing at Pennsylvania’s state capitol building in Harrisburg to protest.It was a split-screen simulcast of America’s intensified political division, as Donald Trump’s defeat was jubilantly celebrated 130 miles east in Philadelphia, and in cities around the country.And just as Trump has refused to accept the outcome, so too have many of the around 70m people who voted for him, claiming instead that his loss was the result of ballot fraud – a baseless assertion promoted by the White House – and media manipulation. “We need to make sure every legal vote is found and to make sure this election is fair,” the Yorktown state representative Mike Jones told a cheering crowd. “If we allow this country to succumb to socialism, it will not because the left overpowered us, it will be because good men and women did nothing.”Many here repeated a belief that the media and big tech had been against Trump since the start, with Biden as something of a ride-along.“The election has been called by the media. The government has not certified the votes, so anything could still happen,” said Mary Wallace, a Harrisburg resident, adding: “I want nothing more than for Donald Trump to have four more years.”Wallace’s words echoed those of the president on Saturday morning, when he said his opponent “has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.” More

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      in Elections

      Biden is the projected election winner. Can Trump still stand in his way?

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      News organizations have called the presidential race for Joe Biden and he is now the president-elect of the United States. But Donald Trump refuses to concede. While a concession is not a legal requirement, it does create some uncertainty around what happens between now and the presidential inauguration on 20 January, when the constitution is clear the president’s term ends.
      Here’s what you need to know about challenges to the vote totals over the next few weeks.
      Joe Biden is projected to defeat Donald Trump. Is the election really over?
      Media outlets have called Biden the winner based on their assessment of all of the counting and outstanding votes. They have made the assessment that Biden has a significant enough lead in enough states to get the 270 electoral college votes he needs to be president and that there’s no path forward for Trump.
      The organizations that make these determinations, such as the Associated Press, rely on experts to make these projections and are often extremely cautious because they don’t want to get them wrong. Once a candidate is projected as the president-elect, it is highly unlikely the organization behind that projection would withdraw it.
      As a matter of law, however, state results are not official until they go through a statewide certification process. Each state sets its own deadline for finishing that process. On 14 December, the electors chosen by their respective parties will all meet and cast their votes for president. The electors are chosen based on the certified winner of the popular vote.
      Trump’s campaign is already filing lawsuits challenging votes. Can he change the results of the vote before results are certified and the electoral college meets?
      It’s very unlikely.
      Joe Biden holds a lead of tens of thousands of votes in key states where he needs the electoral college vote, and by about 4m in the overall popular vote. To overturn those margins, the Trump campaign would need to convince judges that those ballots had been cast illegally.
      But election officials closely track mail-in ballots and the ballot counting process, and voter fraud is extremely rare in the US. It will be very hard for Trump to convince judges otherwise.
      So far, Trump’s efforts do not look promising. The handful of lawsuits he has filed are legally shaky, experts say, and even if they had any merit, they would not be sufficient to overturn Biden’s leads. At least two of the suits have already been dismissed.
      Trump has already said he’s going to seek recounts. What does that mean and will that change anything?
      Recounts are a normal process in elections and many states have laws that specifically outline the process under which they occur. In Wisconsin, a candidate is entitled to a recount if the margin is less than 1 percentage point (Biden currently leads Trump there by about 0.7 points). In Georgia, a candidate can request a recount if the margin is less than 0.5% of votes cast (Biden currently leads by about 0.2 points). In Pennsylvania, there is an automatic statewide recount if the margin between the candidates is less than 0.5% of votes cast.
      A recount doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with the initial count – it’s a way of checking the results in a close race. Recounts rarely change the results of a race.
      Between 2000 and 2019, there were 5,778 statewide elections and 31 statewide recounts, according to FairVote, a voting reform group. Three of those recounts resulted in a reversal of the results. FairVote found that margin shifts are usually smaller in recounts with a high number of votes cast and presidential elections usually have the highest turnout.
      Even Scott Walker, the former Republican governor of Wisconsin, has acknowledged Trump is unlikely to overcome Biden’s 20,000-vote lead in the state with a recount.

      But what about the US supreme court? Conservatives have a powerful 6-3 majority there. Can’t Trump ask them to step in and determine the outcome of the election?
      It’s true that the US supreme court is very conservative, but the justices are unlikely to determine the outcome of this election for a few reasons.
      Much of Trump’s focus in challenging the election result has been focused on the fact that election officials are counting mail-in ballots after election day. But even though the ballots are tabulated after election day, all of them were cast on or before it.
      Trump has offered little evidence of any, let alone widespread, ballots that were cast illegally.
      There is currently only one pending case regarding the election in front of the US supreme court. It’s a dispute over whether Pennsylvania ballots that were postmarked by election day but arrive in the days after should be counted. Even though three justices on the court have suggested those ballots should be thrown out, it does not appear that there are enough of those late-arriving ballots to swing the election in Pennsylvania. Even if there were, legal experts have also voiced skepticism over whether the justices would reject the ballots because voters who cast those late-arriving ballots relied on instructions from government officials to believe they would be counted.
      The US supreme court also wants to be seen as above politics and unlikely to get involved in an election where it would have to overturn the results in a number of states. In the 2000 election, the supreme court got involved in one state, Florida. But 2020 is dramatically different. Biden is projected to win a number of key swing states and the court is likely to be very hesitant to get involved. That sets a high bar for Trump and his lawyers: they have to show clear evidence of wrongdoing that would change the results in those places. More

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      in Elections

      Trump loses but results show Republican party has Trumpism in its bones

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      Donald Trump came to use the line often at his campaign rallies. “Can you imagine if you lose to a guy like this?” he would say of Joe Biden. “It’s unbelievable.”
      It’s not so unbelievable now. Despite record turnout, and a tighter than expected race, the US president’s blind faith in the power of positive thinking appears to have collided with the reality of a coronavirus pandemic, a chaotic campaign and the uprising of a democratic and Democratic resistance. He is the first incumbent to lose a bid for re-election since George H W Bush in 1992.
      More successful incumbents have made elections about their challengers rather than themselves. But Trump could neither escape the pandemic and its economic fallout nor find a way to define Biden. With more than 225,000 Americans dead after contracting the virus, his closing rallies were held largely in midwestern states enduring record infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
      The election was always going to be a referendum on Trump in general and his handling of the virus in particular.
      As Trump shot himself in the foot almost daily with crass behaviour and denials of scientific reality, Biden was able to sit back and watch the implosion. His own campaign schedule was lighter, observed public health guidelines and was always sure to keep a laser focus on the pandemic.
      In February, with the economy humming, Trump had some reasons to be confident of re-election. Having filed the paperwork to run on inauguration day, his re-election campaign had built a formidable war chest and data operation. He survived an impeachment trial that led some critics to accuse Democrats of overreach. The president stood in the White House and brandished a newspaper front page that declared “Trump acquitted” – but tectonic plates were shifting beneath his feet. More

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      in US Politics

      The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights

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      President-elect Joe Biden has thanked the American people for their support after winning the US presidential election against Donald Trump. From razor-thin margins, record voter turnout and protests via false claims of victory and Joe and Kamala Harris’s congratulatory call – here’s the story of how the presidency was won
      US election 2020 – live updates
      Biden styled himself as the antithesis to bare-knuckled Trumpism – and won More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat as recriminations begin

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      Donald Trump refused to formally concede the US election on Saturday, even as senior Republicans began to distance themselves from him, and as recriminations were reported among aides to a man doomed to go down as an impeached, one-term president.
      Before the race was called, Trump continued to tweet his defiance and to attract censure for making baseless claims about voter fraud and his supposed victory. He also went to his course in Virginia to play golf. While he played, a defiant statement was issued in his name.
      “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump insisted. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”
      The statement was of a piece with previous tweets and statements since the election on Tuesday – angry, refusing to admit defeat and alleging improprieties by his opponent without providing evidence.
      “The American people are entitled to an honest election,” Trump said. “That means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election.
      “It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.”
      None of what Trump alleged has been proved to be true. Nonetheless, Republican legal challenges in key states are set to continue. Leading the effort to marshal a legal force like that which led the party to victory in the 2000 Florida recount were Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr and his younger brother Eric Trump, and Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor recently seen apparently trying to seduce a young actor posing as a reporter in Sacha Baron Cohen’s second Borat movie.

      “Beginning Monday,” Trump added, “our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American people have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”
      Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, has largely stayed quiet. Nowhere to be seen is an army of lawyers of the size – and skill – Trump will need. The failure to assemble a coherent legal team, and to raise as much as $60m to fund attempts to stop vote counts in some swing states and continue them in others, was in many ways a reflection of previous failures among the small circle of mostly family advisers Trump has kept around him.
      “What a campaign needs to do to staff one statewide recount, let alone multiple recounts, is overwhelming,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a top Republican lawyer who was national counsel to George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, told CNN.
      “Bush v Gore was one state [Florida]. We put out a call and hundreds of lawyers, political operatives and many others responded. Even with that, it taxed the party to its limits to do just one state. It is at best unproven that the Trump campaign can command the sort of infrastructure they would really need to pull this off.”
      The legal challenge to Biden’s victory was placed in the hands of Jay Sekulow, who defended the president during the Mueller investigation and the impeachment process, and Giuliani, who went to Philadelphia to publicly demand Republican operatives be granted greater oversight over the Pennsylvania count.

      Among experts dismissing Trump’s legal moves was James Baker, who led the effort for Bush in Florida which wrested the White House from Al Gore.
      It was reported this week that Kushner was placing calls from the Trump war room, in search of his own version of Baker, a former chief of staff, treasury secretary and secretary of state. Baker has backed Trump. But he told the New York Times that 20 years ago, “We never said don’t count the votes. That’s a very hard decision to defend in a democracy.”
      Trump advisers have reportedly raised the prospect of defeat. According to the Washington Post, some have advocated that the president offer public remarks committing to a peaceful transfer of power. One senior aide, however, said there had been no discussion of a formal concession.
      Some supporters in the media have begun to back away. Late on Friday, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham, an ardent loyalist, advised the president to “accept defeat”, should it come, with “grace and composure”. Ingraham also railed at “failed” consultants and campaign officials who “blew through hundreds of millions of dollars without the legal apparatus in place to challenge what we all knew was coming.
      “Why aren’t the best lawyers in America on television night after night explaining the president’s legal claims?” she asked. More

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      in Elections

      Joe Biden wins US election after four tumultuous years of Trump presidency

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      Joe Biden has been elected the 46th president of the United States, achieving a decades-long political ambition and denying Donald Trump a second term after a deeply divisive presidency defined by a once-in-a-century pandemic, economic turmoil and social unrest.
      Biden won the presidency by clinching Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, after several days of painstaking vote-counting following record turnout across the country. The win in Pennsylvania, which the Associated Press called at 11.25am ET on Saturday with 99% of the votes counted, took Biden’s electoral college vote to 284, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House.
      “In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted, proving once again that democracy beats deep in the heart of America,” Biden said in a statement after the result was called on Saturday, exactly 48 years after he was first elected to the US Senate.
      “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite and to heal.”
      The president-elect, joined by his running mate, Kamala Harris, was expected to address the nation later on Saturday.

      In electing Biden, the American people have replaced a real estate developer and reality TV star who had no previous political experience with a veteran of Washington who has spent more than 50 years in public life, and who twice ran unsuccessfully for president. Trump is the first incumbent to lose re-election since 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush.
      Despite a long-standing tradition of peacefully accepting the outcome of US elections, Trump refused to concede and threatened unspecified legal challenges regarding the vote counting process.
      Biden’s victory, fueled by women and people of color who spent the last four years resisting and mobilizing against Trump, was celebrated as a repudiation of a president who shattered democratic norms and stoked racial and cultural grievance. Cheers, honking and dancing erupted in emotional displays of joy on the streets of major cities across the country, including in the nation’s capital, where Biden will be sworn into office on 20 January.
      However, the nation’s deep divisions were laid bare as pro-Trump protesters continued to claim that the election had been stolen from a president who millions still view as a defender of “law and order” at home and of “America first” abroad.
      With turnout projected to reach its highest point in a century despite the pandemic, a fearful and anxious nation elected a candidate who promised to govern not as a Democrat but as an “American president” and vowed to be a unifying force after four years of upheaval.

      The result also marked a historic milestone for Harris, 56, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants who will become the first woman – and the first woman of color – to serve as vice-president. Her presence on the Democratic ticket was a rejoinder to Trump, who spent four years scapegoating migrants and attacking women and communities of color.
      The outcome threatened to send convulsions across the country, as Trump and his campaign continued to make baseless claims of voter fraud and vowed to challenge the results.
      “Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media,” the president said in a statement, which was sent while he played golf at his golf course in Virginia.
      Trump’s statement included a litany of unfounded assertions about the vote-counting process, and attempted to undermine faith in the integrity of the electoral system by advancing a conspiracy about “legal” and “illegal” votes.
      At 77, Biden is set to become America’s oldest president. His triumph came more than 48 hours after polls closed on election day, as officials in key states worked furiously to tally ballots amid an unprecedented surge in mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people and infected millions.
      A father and husband who buried his first wife and his infant daughter in 1972 after they were killed in a car crash, and decades later buried his adult son after he died from brain cancer in 2015, Biden sought to empathize with Americans who lost loved ones to the coronavirus. More