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      The Guardian view on Biden and the world: undoing Trump’s damage | Editorial

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      Donald Trump is a “symptom of malaise, and decline, and decay” in the US, his former top Russia expert Fiona Hill has observed. If some countries have thus seized upon his presidency as an opportunity, many have been horrified.
      Few US elections were watched quite as anxiously as this one around the world. Widespread relief at Joe Biden’s victory is evident. Much foreign policy, unlike domestic, can be enacted by executive order, without the backing of the Senate. At the most basic level, he will be a president who is patient enough to read a report and knowledgeable enough to understand it; who grasps that America cannot prosper alone; who does not lavish praise on dictators while humiliating democratic allies; who listens to his own intelligence services over Vladimir Putin; and who will entrust Middle East policy to seasoned officials rather than his son-in-law.
      Mr Biden has already vowed to undo many of Mr Trump’s decisions, rejoining the Paris climate change agreement and rescinding the order to withdraw from the World Health Organization. He plans to extend the soon-to-expire New Start treaty with Russia – the last arms control agreement standing. Tackling the pandemic is likely to be a priority for his international diplomacy: signing up to Covax – the global initiative to ensure that poorer nations also get a share of coronavirus vaccines – would send a powerful signal. More than 180 countries have already done so, including China.
      The wait to enter the White House has dangers of its own. Other nations may take advantage of US distraction. The president-elect is not receiving intelligence briefings, leaving him in the dark as he prepares for office. There are anxieties that Mr Trump’s replacement of the defence secretary, Mark Esper, and other senior officials with loyalists may not just be payback for public disagreement, but about paving the way for action at home or abroad. Key administration officials have visited Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia since the election to discuss Iran, raising concerns that Mr Trump might yet pursue a scorched-earth policy – perhaps upping the pressure on Tehran so that it hits back, making it far harder to salvage the nuclear deal.
      The Trump administration has been much tougher on Beijing than anticipated, and has taken measures such as imposing sanctions on officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Yet on this relationship, as elsewhere, the president has been both erratic and crudely transactional, making it clear that human rights concerns are barterable for a better deal on trade. The turn against China has also come across the political spectrum, in response to its actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and above all internationally. Countering such behaviour will require intelligence, experience (the state department has been hollowed out and politicised) and consistency. Shoring up international alliances is essential. Finding ways to support Taiwan that don’t backfire in the response they trigger from Beijing will be crucial – and extremely hard.
      Critics of Mr Trump have sometimes taken an overly rosy view of US foreign policy before him. Mr Biden is likely, in essence, to pursue the status quo ante. But if Mr Trump recognised that America’s place in the world was changing, he has also sped its decline. That such a man could become president, and that he could govern as he has, has fundamentally diminished US standing. The world has watched in disbelief as the president has allowed coronavirus to ravage his nation – and now as he refuses to concede. Last week, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, attacked Beijing for crushing democracy in Hong Kong – but while opining, with a smirk, that at home there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.
      If large parts of the world thought the US was malign or at least deeply flawed before, they also thought it mostly functioning and competent, and often enviable. Demolition is an easier task than construction. Mr Biden will undo some of the worst aspects of the last four years, but he cannot erase them from the record. More

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      Trump tweets that Biden 'won' – but repeats baseless vote fraud claim

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      [embedded content]
      On Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted about Joe Biden.
      “He won,” he wrote.
      But it was not the formal concession of the US presidential election which Trump has refused to give, despite every major media organisation calling the race for Biden with an electoral college result of 306-232 – coincidentally the same margin by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, a result he insisted was a landslide.
      Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3m in the popular vote. Biden is more than 5m up.
      “He won because the election was rigged,” Trump wrote, before recycling a melange of the baseless claims of voter fraud he continues to push and which his lawyers are attempting to prove in court in battleground states – with little to no chance of success, according to most observers.
      According to practice, Twitter tagged the Trump tweet with a message: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”
      According to NBC News, an anonymous White House official said the tweet about how Biden won “may very well” represent the start of some sort of Trump concession.
      One Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, followed suit, telling NBC’s Meet the Press: “It was good actually to see President Trump tweet out that ‘he won’. I think that’s a start of an acknowledgment.”
      But the president disagreed, tweeting: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!”
      Mainstream experts and analysts agree it was not. The presidential result in Georgia is subject to a recount – which Trump on Sunday called a “scam” – but it is not expected to slip from Biden’s column and the Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January.
      On Sunday Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Trump’s tweets had no bearing on the actuality of the election.
      “Donald Trump’s Twitter feed doesn’t make Joe Biden president or not president,” Klain told NBC’s Meet the Press. “The American people did that.”
      From Wilmington, Delaware, the president-elect continues to consider cabinet appointments and legislative priorities and to issue appeals to the country to take seriously the spiralling coronavirus pandemic.
      But Trump’s refusal to concede is affecting Biden’s preparations, with transition funds unreleased and national security briefings not given.
      Klain said the federal government needed to sign off on transition efforts this week, so briefings can begin, and so Biden can begin to address the Covid-19 crisis.
      Hutchinson agreed, telling NBC: “It is very important that Joe Biden have access to the intelligence briefings to make sure that he is prepared.
      “During times of transition our enemies have an opportunity to take advantage of us, and we want to make sure that there is a smooth transition, particularly when it comes to the vaccine distribution [so that] everybody understands what we’re doing there and what the plan is for the future.”
      But Hutchinson also pointed to a problem for Republican elected officials, which is that Trump retains the support of most Republican voters – many of whom believe his claims about the election.
      “Clearly, President Trump will have a voice for a long time in the party,” Hutchinson said. “Anybody that can generate those kinds of crowds … will have an influence for some time to come.”
      On Saturday, Trump supporters gathered in Washington to back the president and reject Biden. Trump waved to the crowd from his motorcade, as it drove to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia.
      On Sunday, the president had no public events on his schedule. From the White House, he issued volley after volley of tweets. Then he drove back to his golf course. More

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      Trump will cast a long shadow over Republican party despite defeat

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      [embedded content]
      For Republican leaders it was, perhaps, the worst of all possible worlds.
      A victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential election would have preserved their power. A landslide defeat might have eviscerated Trumpism and finally broken the spell, giving them leverage to steer the party in a new direction.
      But neither of these scenarios happened. Trump gained more than 72m votes, beating his 2016 total and every presidential candidate in history other than his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, who topped 77m to clinch the White House.
      It was hardly the repudiation of Trumpism that many had hoped for. It leaves the 74-year-old soon-to-be ex-president intact as the dominant figure in his party, an albatross around the neck of every Republican. There has been no better illustration than their awkward complicity with Trump’s refusal to accept the election result.
      “No doubt his hold over the Republican party will be stronger next year than it is this year,” said Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois. “Biden won but Trump won too because he gets to keep his lie that this election was stolen from him. As long as he gets to say that, all of his supporters will believe him and then the Republican party will be beholden to him.”
      A brash businessman and reality TV star, Trump staged a hostile takeover of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan in 2016, knocking out 16 major candidates in the primaries in what amounted to a fierce rebuke of the Republican establishment. It was widely assumed he would then be demolished by the vastly more experienced Hillary Clinton, yet he pulled off a narrow victory in the electoral college. More

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      Laugh? We nearly all died – why my US failed state Twitter thread went viral

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      The chaotic US election has undoubtedly been the biggest story in the world in the last two weeks. Watching it unfold from over 13,000km away in Kenya, the election itself – the long queues, the delayed and disputed vote count, impugned credibility – was disturbingly familiar. Our own elections follow a near-identical pattern. The media coverage, not so much.
      Gone were the condescending tone, the adjective-laden labels and the expectation of violence and malfeasance so often applied to “foreign” elections. In its place was an easy familiarity and assumption of competence.
      The media did not feel it necessary to depict the US as a crisis-wracked, oil-rich, nuclear-armed North American country with armed terror groups roaming its ethnically polarized restless interior. But these were exactly the sorts of descriptors that have traditionally allowed western audiences to identify with and follow events in distant, “exotic” places. It seemed to me that the rest of us deserved the same consideration. And so I decided to offer this perspective in a Twitter thread

      gathara
      (@gathara)
      #BREAKING After days in barricaded presidential palace, US dictator, Donald Trump, hesitantly emerges to attend ceremony for fallen troops in coastal capital, Washington DC. Race is now on to get back to the palace before President-elect Joe Biden can sneak in and depose him.

      November 11, 2020

      Clearly, many across the globe felt similarly, given the response the thread has attracted. At last count, it had been viewed nearly 4m times, attracting more than 50,000 likes and nearly half as many retweets. And there was more than mere interest in the mechanics of what was happening in the US. There was a fair bit of joy at its expense.

      gathara
      (@gathara)
      #BREAKING Rumors – hotly denied by regime officials – are spreading that US dictator, Donald Trump, who has not been seen in public since he returned to the barricaded presidential palace days ago, may have fled the crisis-torn republic for asylum in an undisclosed country.

      November 11, 2020

      In 2016, the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, may have exaggerated somewhat when he declared: “The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.” No longer. As counting in the crisis-wracked North American state entered its 10th day, around the world it had become the butt of many jokes. After decades of enduring its hubris and condescension, many are happy to see the self-anointed “shining city on a hill” and self-proclaimed “greatest country in the history of the world” knocked down a peg or two.

      gathara
      (@gathara)
      #BREAKING As ruthless purge of disloyal elements within the country’s military continues, US Foreign Minister accuses opposition of rigging presidential elections raising fears corrupt regime of aging dictator, Donald Trump, will declare state of emergency and cling to power.

      November 11, 2020

      In truth, it has been a long time coming. For a long time, America has been to the world what Trump has been to America – a bull in a china shop. Rich, entitled, brash, over-confident and often downright stupid, since the end of the cold war the country has traipsed around the world, breaking stuff as it went, throwing its weight around, and playing fast and loose with cherished global norms. Its journalists and moviemakers (and president) rarely missed the opportunity to stress just what an uncivilized “shithole” the rest of the globe was and how much we needed the enlightenment offered by the Peace Corps.
      America always seemed surprised that other people did not necessarily appreciate being insulted or told how to live. Like Trump, it has had its enablers. Some, like the British, were true believers in its “manifest destiny” to rule and deliver the world. Others, like the French, were content to give their support while holding their noses.
      Like Trump, America’s successes were primarily economic and its monumental failures, in places like Vietnam and Iraq, cost hundreds and thousands of lives. It had a complicated relationship with the truth as exemplified by Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations, laying out the Bush administration’s rationale for war in Iraq. Like Trump it cozied up to dictators in Africa and gave a wink and a nudge to the apartheid regimes in South Africa and in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel.
      Inevitably perhaps, America’s excesses inspired a rival. Today, America finds itself as a bull in China’s shop. It has slowly been eclipsed in many areas where it was once dominant, especially in trade and lately in technology. And America has reacted much like Trump to the loss of its position as top dog – it is throwing a tantrum. From inciting a trade war to trying to wreck global alliances and treaties, to undermining the multilateral system, the US is showing that it will not go quietly into the sunset.
      Given all this, many around the world can be excused for feeling a little schadenfreude as the US is humiliated by an election that has ruthlessly exposed its inadequacies, and a president that has made a mockery of its claim to be the king of democracies.
      The election and four years of Trump have shown that far from being a paragon of democracy, the US has not only neglected its decaying democratic institutions at home, but has also incubated a dangerous authoritarianism. As the US fixes itself, the rest of us too need to reform the international system which for too long has operated on the mistaken belief that the US is what it claimed to be. The Trump presidency should be the wake up call we all need to build a better world.
      Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan political cartoonist, satirist and writer. Twitter: @gathara More

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      Democrats divided: Biden's election win brings end to party's uneasy truce

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      Joe Biden’s first hours as president-elect were met by his supporters with spontaneous dance parties, champagne showers and car parades that wound through several blocks. But amid the “Biden-Harris” placards and T-shirts dotting a diverse crowd gathered in front of the White House last week, there was a creeping sense that the source of their shared jubilation had less to do with the dragon-slayer than the dragon slayed.
      Since the moment Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Democrats aligned to plot his removal. They resisted, organized and mobilized, unified around the goal of removing a president they believed was uniquely dangerous. They succeeded. But their success also marked the end of an election-season truce that at times obscured deep ideological and generational differences.
      Democrats face a reckoning, four years in the making, after an election that accomplished their mission but did little to resolve urgent questions about the party’s political future and serious internal divisions.
      The first order of business is a “deep dive” into why more Americans than at any moment in the nation’s 244-year history voted for Biden and yet, despite bold predictions of a unified government come January 2021, Democrats ended up with a weakened House majority and an uphill battle to take control of the Senate.
      “What’s clear is that voters did not feel comfortable giving Democrats every lever of power,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice-president for social policy and politics at the centrist thinktank Third Way. “And the question is, why not?”
      The answer, of course, depends on who you ask.
      A tense conference call among House Democrats, in which moderate members blamed the left wing for costing them congressional seats, opened a fiery public debate over how to turn a majority coalition into governing majorities.
      Moderates argue that Biden’s success, which included reclaiming three states in the Rust Belt Trump won in 2016 and expanding the map to Sun Belt battlegrounds, was evidence that a moderate who rejected liberal appeals was best positioned to build a winning coalition.
      “There are clearly some parts of the Democratic brand that voters across the country did not feel comfortable with,” Erickson said. A post-election analysis by Third Way found that Republicans effectively weaponized ideas like defunding the police and Medicare for All against Democrats in competitive districts, even if they did not support such policies.
      Far from being tempered by the congressional setbacks, progressives are emboldened. In a series of interviews, op-eds and open letters, they blamed unexpected losses on an embrace of “status quo centrism” that failed to capture voters’ imagination and faulted moderate candidates for not developing strong enough brands and digital strategies to withstand inevitable attacks.
      “They are dead wrong,” Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator who lost to Biden in the Democratic primary, wrote in an USA Today op-ed. He noted that every House co-sponsor of Medicare for All and all but one co-sponsor of the Green New Deal were re-elected, including several competitive districts.
      “The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living wage jobs, criminal justice reform and universal childcare,” Sanders wrote, “but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class – Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American.”
      Biden won the primary after refusing to move left, but as the nominee embraced a sweeping economic vision that drew comparisons with FDR’s New Deal. In remarks after the election, Biden said that his resounding victory had given him a “mandate for action” on the economy, the pandemic, climate and racial inequality.
      But the breadth and contours of that mandate are up for debate. The election returned a complicated tableau of wins and losses for Democrats that defy sweeping conclusions about the electorate.
      Biden won Arizona and is set to take Georgia, after years of organizing by progressive Black and Latino activists in the traditionally Republican states. At the same time, sweeping advances with moderates and independents in the suburbs around fast-growing metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Atlanta helped secure his lead.
      It was moderate Democrats who flipped Senate seats in Colorado and Arizona, the party’s only additions so far, even as a number of battleground states voted for progressive ballot measures that included legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and taxing wealthy Americans to fund public education. More

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      US poll chaos is a boon for the enemies of democracy the whole world over

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      Believe it or not, the world did not stop turning on its axis because of the US election and ensuing, self-indulgent disputes in the land of the free-for-all. In the age of Donald Trump, narcissism spreads like the plague.But the longer the wrangling in Washington continues, the greater the collateral damage to America’s global reputation – and to less fortunate states and peoples who rely on the US and the western allies to fly the flag for democracy and freedom.Consider, for example, the implications of the Israeli army’s operation, on US election day, to raze the homes of 74 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the occupied West Bank village of Khirbet Humsa. The pace of West Bank demolitions has increased this year, possibly in preparation for Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley – a plan backed in principle by Trump. Appealing for international intervention, the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, claimed Israel had acted while “attention is focused on the US election”. Yet worse may be to come.Trump’s absurdly lopsided Middle East “peace plan” gave Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s rightwing leader, virtual carte blanche to expand settlements and seize Palestinian land. Joe Biden has promised to revive the two-state solution. But while the power struggle rages in Washington, analysts warn, Netanyahu may continue to arbitrarily create new “facts on the ground” – with Trump’s blessing.“Over the next 11 weeks, we are likely to see a major uptick in Israeli demolitions, evictions, settlement announcements, and perhaps even formal annexation of parts of the occupied territories, as Netanyahu and his allies in the settler movement seek to make the most of Trump’s remaining time in office,” Khaled Elgindy of Washington’s Middle East Institute predicted.The Khirbet Humsa incident gained widespread media attention. The same cannot be said of a football pitch massacre in northern Mozambique that also coincided with US polling. While Americans were counting votes, villagers in Cabo Delgado province were counting bodies after Islamic State-affiliated extremists decapitated more than 50 victims.Nearly 450,000 people have been displaced, and up to 2,000 killed, in an escalating insurgency in the mainly Muslim province where extreme poverty exists alongside valuable, western-controlled gas and mineral riches. Chinese, US and British energy companies are all involved there. Mozambique’s government has appealed for help, saying its forces cannot cope.Trump’s ‘man of the people’ myth of resisting a liberal conspiracy is the ultra-toxic element of his poisonous legacyBiden vows to maintain the fight against Isis. But it’s unclear if he is willing to look beyond Syria-Iraq and expand US involvement in the new Islamist killing grounds of the Sahel, west Africa and the Mozambique-Tanzania border.As for Trump, he claimed credit last year for “defeating 100% of the Isis caliphate”. The fool thinks it’s all over. In any case, he has shown zero interest in what he calls “shithole” African countries.Afghanistan is another conflict zone where the cost of US paralysis is counted in civilian lives. It’s a war Trump claims to be ending but which is currently escalating fast.While all eyes were supposedly on Pennsylvania, Kabul university was devastated when gunmen stormed classrooms, killing 22 students. Another four people were killed last week by a suicide bomber in Kandahar.Overall, violence has soared in recent months as the US and the Taliban (which denied responsibility for the Kabul atrocity) argue in Qatar. Trump plainly wants US troops out at any price. Biden is more circumspect about abandoning Afghanistan, but there’s little he can do right now .The Biden-Trump stand-off encourages uncertainty and instability, inhibiting the progress of international cooperation on a multitude of issues such as the climate crisis and the global pandemic. It also facilitates regression by malign actors.China’s opportunistic move to debilitate Hong Kong’s legislative assembly last week by expelling opposition politicians was a stark warning to Democrats and Republicans alike. Beijing just gave notice it will not tolerate democratic ideas, open societies and free speech, there or anywhere.China’s leaders apparently calculated, correctly, that the US was so distracted by its presidential melodrama that it would be incapable of reacting in any meaningful way.Taiwan’s people have cause to worry. The “renegade” island is next on Chinese president Xi Jinping’s reunification wish-list. Who would bet money on the US riding to Taipei’s rescue if Beijing takes aim?Much has been said about the negative domestic ramifications of Trump’s spiteful disruption of the presidential transition – his lawsuits, his refusal to share daily intelligence briefings with Biden, and his appointment of loyalists to key Pentagon posts. He hopes to turn January’s two Senate election re-runs in Georgia into a referendum – on him.But not enough attention is being paid to how this constitutional chaos affects America’s influence and leadership position in the world – or to the risk Trump might take last-minute, punitive unilateral action against, say, Iran or Venezuela. Like Xi, Vladimir Putin undoubtedly relishes US confusion. He may find ways to take advantage, as with last week’s Moscow-imposed Armenia-Azerbaijan “peace deal”. Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist and rightwing populist leaders everywhere take comfort from America’s perceived democratic nervous breakdown.This is the worst of it. By casting doubt on the election’s legitimacy, Trump nurtures and instructs anti-democratic rogues the world over. The Belarus-style myth he peddles, and will perpetuate, of a strong “man of the people” resisting a conspiracy plotted by corrupt liberal elites, is the final, toxic element of his profoundly poisonous legacy.Farmers in Palestine, fishermen in Mozambique, and students in Kabul all pay a heavy price for his unprincipled lies and puerile irresponsibility. So, too, does the cause of global democracy. More

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      The Observer view on the sniping over Joe Biden’s victory | Observer editorial

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      Now the fog of political war has cleared, it’s plain that Joe Biden scored a truly remarkable victory in the US presidential election. It’s never easy to dislodge a sitting president. Bill Clinton was the last challenger to pull it off, in 1992. When the incumbent is as unscrupulous as Donald Trump, defeating him requires a very special skill set. Yet Biden managed it with votes to spare.Despite jitters over early, unfavourable results, inaccurate opinion polls and Trump’s premature declaration, Biden won the electoral college by a solid margin and beat his rival by more than 5m votes, 50.9% to 47.3%. He reconquered key midwest states lost in 2016 and, it was confirmed on Friday, “flipped” Georgia and Arizona. It’s good news that Americans turned out in record numbers for this momentous democratic exercise. Biden won more votes than any previous presidential candidate. It’s good news, too, that despite fears of repeat Russian meddling and Trump’s ridiculous claims of fraud, federal and state oversight officials have unequivocally declared the election free and fair.Strange, then, that some on the left in America and Britain have been grudging, if not downright critical of a Democratic triumph that owed its success to the broad, inclusive coalition that Biden forged. This odd reluctance stems partly from the sinistral conviction that Biden is doomed to fail. Although he won more than 78m votes, Trump won more than 72m. This is taken as gloomy proof that America is irreparably divided, that Biden’s mission to reunify the country cannot succeed and that in 2024, a sort of Trump-plus candidate – nasty like him, but smarter – will sweep to power. Underlying this analysis is a more fundamental objection: that Biden is not sufficiently radical – a lifelong centrist who cannot deliver the systemic change, ideological and political, deemed necessary to reorder society. This is the view broadly represented by Bernie Sanders, Biden’s vanquished rival, and by new-generation progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.America, or most of it, does not seek a revolution. It seeks a restorationProceeding from this premise, it is argued that, if the Democratic party had pledged itself unambiguously to providing universal healthcare, reducing inequality through wealth redistribution and overthrowing neoliberalism and the “donor class”, it would have gained, not lost, seats in Congress – and Biden would have won even more decisively.His detractors claim Biden offers more of the same old middling Obama agenda. For them, only the iconoclastic “populist left” has a transformative vision; his watchword – consensus – signifies appeasement. Yet it’s precisely because Biden offered a return to the familiar middle ground after Trump’s craziness that people chose him. America, or most of it, does not seek a revolution. It seeks a restoration. Voters want a safe pair of hands, someone they can trust at a time of great anxiety. Biden certainly faces a daunting in-tray: most immediately, the pandemic response, plus the economic recession, racial injustice, an ultra-conservative supreme court threatening health and abortion rights and many international problems, with the climate crisis and China to the fore. It’s true that white working-class alienation and the urban-rural split, which Trump exploited, are prominent among these challenges.Yet to suggest Biden is incapable of bridging these divides and that his proffered solutions – a stimulus package, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, large-scale public investment and an epic switch to clean energy – will flop because they do not go far enough is unduly pessimistic. It’s akin to saying America is incapable of change. That’s not so, as history shows.Biden’s critics seem to prefer uncompromising defeat to pragmatic success. By questioning his fitness, they suggest voters are easily fooled, ignorant or don’t know what they want. This is not a good place for a socialist to be. So let’s wholeheartedly applaud Biden’s victory. Trump is beat and there’s a vaccine, too! What’s not to like? More

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      Trump's refusal to concede is just the latest gambit to please Republican donors

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      Leave it to Trump and his Republican allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.
      The cost of this misplaced attention is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster relief.
      The other cost is found in the millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.
      Trump is continuing this charade because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024, whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.
      Leading Republicans like Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell are going along with it because donors are refilling GOP coffers.
      The biggest beneficiaries are the party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.
      Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47tn richer.
      A low-income American earning $35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker $42,000 per year.
      The upward redistribution of $47tn wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft everyone else.
      Monopolies expanded because antitrust laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples’ money and was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.
      When Covid-19 hit, Big Tech cornered the market, the rich traded on inside information and the Treasury and the Fed bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March, billionaire wealth has soared while most of America has become poorer.
      How could the oligarchy get away with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the bottom 90% are bitterly divided.
      Long before Trump, the GOP suggested to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people, Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites”, bureaucrats and “socialists”. Trump rode their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen election.
      The oligarchy surely appreciates the Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly supreme court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an electorate more fiercely split than ever.
      Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their power and keeps the big money rolling in.
      The president-elect aspires to find a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the oligarchy.
      Biden and the Democrats will better serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would be $47tn richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.
      This would require that Democrats abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.
      They’d have to show white working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic and social justice.
      Easy to say, hugely difficult to accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it really is, there’s no alternative.
      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