US elections 2020

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      Loser! Voters revel in targeting Trump with one of his favourite taunts

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      As the president refuses to concede defeat, there has been no shortage of people keen to tell him: ‘You’re fired’“Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years!” This is how Donald Trump advised the failed Democratic candidate for president in 2017, but it seems he has been unable to heed the same advice. Related: ‘Make America rake again’: Four Seasons Total Landscaping cashes in on Trump fiasco Continue reading… More

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      Biden is far from perfect – but we should still take a moment to savour his victory | Suzanne Moore

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      There are many things Joe Biden is not. He is not young. He is not an anti-establishment peacenik. He is not unbeholden to huge, anonymous donors. He is not free of accusations of using male privilege to be gropey with women. He is neither a radical, nor exciting. He is not a brilliant orator. He is not Bernie Sanders. And on it goes: the disappointments pile up thick and fast.
      But he is not a loser – and he is not Donald Trump. So let us have a moment, however brief, of celebration.
      Is the left so downright miserable that it cannot accept winning if the winner is imperfect or even worse than Trump, as I have seen some Instagram revolutionaries claim? Can we not luxuriate in Trump’s ongoing golf strop while creepy Rudy Giuliani rummages around in a car park next to a sex shop for a so-called press conference? Can we not speculate that Melania Trump already has the lawyers in? That pre-nup won’t go to waste.
      The left is so accustomed to losing that a strange phenomenon has occurred: we have become sore winners. Biden did not win by enough, the complaints go, nor did he immediately acknowledge the groundwork by the left, nor the part played by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his victory. Biden will be hamstrung, as the Democrats are unlikely to take control of the Senate, which hangs on the traditionally Republican vote in Georgia. The normality that Biden wants to restore is profoundly unequal … and on it goes.
      Then there is Kamala Harris, who is also not good enough, apparently, because of her former role as a prosecutor, in which she ended up incarcerating a lot of black men. Yet here she is telling us that she is the first – but not the last – woman of colour to be vice-president. If that doesn’t gladden your heart, I don’t know what will.
      God knows what damage Trump will do in the next months, assuming it is illegal to Taser him during his terrible swing and cart him off in a buggy. I imagine there will be lots of pardons for those still bobbing about in the cesspit. He is friendless, in denial and in enormous debt, apparently rejecting the advice of family members to concede. It is said that he screamed at Rupert Murdoch when Fox News called Arizona for Biden. Covid death figures mean nothing, ratings everything. His interior landscape seems to be a void.
      Seventy million votes for Trump and these people are not going away – and don’t we know it?
      Shops and offices are boarded up. The armed militias that Trump tells to stand by are still there. Many remain fearful. It strikes me that hope and fear are more intimately connected than we acknowledge. Many of us were afraid to hope for a Biden win because, lately, hopes have been dashed repeatedly. Yet, as the composer Ernest Bloch said: “Hope can learn and become smarter through damaging experience, but it can never be driven off course.” Hope, he said, is “characteristically daring”.
      Biden has a huge mandate. In terms of the environment, surely the most important issue, he has room for manoeuvre: he can develop Barack Obama’s clean power plan; he can rejoin international accords; he can, in short, act as if the climate emergency is real. This is no small thing.
      This election emphasised the gulf between the urban and rural populations of the US. The gulf is huge because the US is huge. I have read far too many leftist takes by those for whom New York, San Francisco and Washington DC constitute the US. Alabama, Montana, Kentucky, anyone?
      The coastal elites are as ignorant of their own country as Europeans are. One of the shocks about the US is that the media remains local, rather than national. Trump worked this well, utilising what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “sadopopulism”, in which the state is not about governing, but about making others suffer more – hence the ever-expanding list of enemies, from Mexican “rapists” to journalists to the post office.
      Covid exacerbated this. Mask wearers and people who told the truth about the disease were to be added to the long list of un-Americans. The delusion that “vulnerability is for losers” penetrated the psyches of those who were losing. The fantasy of winning back jobs is more appealing than the truth that some jobs can’t be won back. Trump voters remind me of something an MP in a leave constituency told me about Brexit: “You have to understand, it’s the first time they have been on the winning side in their lives.”
      It is easy enough to mock that, but I wouldn’t. It is also easy enough to say Biden is not the revolution. Now that Trump is a gouged-out egomaniac, his narcissism has metastasised to many parts of the US, where the malignancy grows.
      None of this easy, but a little light has got in. Celebrate the feeling while it lasts. The virus continues. Almost half of the US supports Trump, but something is changing. Take a deep breath. Inhale the hope, while you can.
      Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist More

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      Stacey Abrams: Georgia's political heroine … and romance author

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      Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.Abrams published the novel under a pen name “to separate my fiction from more academic publications on tax policy”. Seven more novels would follow, including Never Tell, which sees criminal psychologist Dr Erin Abbott take on a New Orleans serial killer with the help of journalist Gabriel Moss; Hidden Sins, which follows Mara Reed as she reunites with the scientist whose heart she once broke in her hometown; and Reckless, in which top lawyer Kell Jameson faces her past when the head of her childhood orphanage is accused of murder.In 2018, when Abrams made an unsuccessful bid to become governor of Georgia, she told Entertainment Weekly that she believed she could tell her characters stories “in ways that are engaging, but are also reflective of the complexity of women’s lives”.“Whether I’m writing about an ethno-botanist or a woman who’s raising orphans in South Georgia, the challenge of telling their stories is the same challenge I face as a legislator who has to talk to someone about passing a bill on kinship care, helping grandparents raising grandchildren, or blocking a tax bill because I’m using expertise they don’t realise I have,” she said. “I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are. It respects the diversity of our experiences, and it creates space for broader conversations.”With Biden narrowly ahead in the Georgia recount, readers are now rushing to snap up Abrams’ books. US romance bookshop the Ripped Bodice sold 100 copies of her novels in just 12 hours. And as they pointed out on Twitter, “while [Abrams] was busy turning Georgia blue, she also wrote a new suspense novel”. While Justice Sleeps, out next May, follows a young law clerk, Avery Keene, who works for the legendary but cantankerous Justice Wynn. When Wynn slips into a coma, Avery discovers a conspiracy that has infiltrated the heart of US politics.“A decade ago, I wrote the first draft of a novel that explored an intriguing aspect of American democracy – the lifetime appointments to the US supreme court,” Abrams said in a statement. “Drawing on my own background as a lawyer and politician, While Justice Sleeps weaves between the supreme court, the White House and international intrigue to see what happens when a lowly law clerk controls the fate of a nation.”Abrams’ fellow romance writers, meanwhile, have launched an auction and fundraiser at Romancing the Runoff to help support the Georgia senate run-offs. “We’re here to help give 2020 a happily ever after,” they say. And they’ve already made $60,000 (£46,400). More

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      Trump was unique. The Republicans will struggle to find another like him | Jan-Werner Mueller

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      None of this is to say that Trumpism will disappear, but he was a master at selling illusions – and few have his skillsetLiberal and conservative commentators are fast converging on a prediction: Donald Trump might be gone, but Trumpism is here to stay. Of course, the former are anxious that a smooth, smart authoritarian will pick up where Trump left off and make the US join the rightwing populist international of autocrats like Modi, Erdogan and Orbán; the latter are hoping for a Republican party somehow dedicated to an “American worker” who we ought to imagine as a conservative nationalist. Both sides overestimate Trumpism and – still, after all these years – underestimate Trump himself.Conventional wisdom has it that figures like Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, or even a TV personality like Tucker Carlson are auditioning to claim the Trumpist movement. There is little doubt that the movement is potent: after five years, plenty of citizens deeply identify as Trumpists; and a whole folklore has been built around Maga. The Republican party has every reason to deploy this movement against the Biden administration and combine Mitch McConnell’s Machiavellianism from above with more or less manipulated grass-roots pressure from below, strung along by Fox and talk radio which will never forget that polarization is big business. After all, such a dual strategy – Republican establishment plus Tea party – already served to sabotage crucial parts of the Obama presidency. Continue reading… More

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      Make no mistake: Biden's success is an important win for the world | Cas Mudde

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the popular vote with a record number of votes. That is worth celebratingSo, it wasn’t a landslide, but it will be a decisive victory after all. With an estimated 306 electoral college votes, Biden will even be two votes above Trump’s “biggest electoral college victory since Reagan” in 2016.But seriously, it will be weird to have a president again who will live in our reality rather than his own. I wonder how long we will enjoy it. People forget fast, and media and pundits even faster. How long before we will all complain about how “boring” and “predictable” Biden is, two of the characteristics that helped him win the election. Continue reading… More

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      How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video

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      In the final episode of Anywhere but Washington, Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone return to Florida, the crucial swing state that Donald Trump won last week. His victory there paved the way for his baseless attacks on the election process. From Palm Beach county, home to the president’s private club Mar-a-Lago, election night turns into election week, in a story of hope and joy but also division and lies
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      Will Trump accept defeat and leave the White House? Yes, experts say

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      Donald Trump may never concede that he legitimately lost the 2020 election and the US presidency.That in itself will probably not matter too much, but he may use his final months in office before Joe Biden takes office in January, 2021 to push the divisive politics that have become his calling card. He may even boycott Biden’s inauguration ceremony.But even if Trump and his colleagues sow a sloppy, chaotic and vindictive transition of power, it’s still unfathomable that the one-term president would belligerently barricade himself inside the Oval Office and refuse to leave, says Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College.“I do not see that happening,” says Douglas, whose book Will He Go? considers the aftermath of the 2020 election. “I think at some point, Donald Trump will submit to defeat.”After flirting with the idea of rejecting unfavorable election results for years, Trump has stoked fears of worst-case scenarios: civil war, a weaponized supreme court, and even the end to American democracy. With only 10% of Trump’s supporters initially believing Biden won the presidential contest, many Americans are also concerned about an outburst of violence, even as the rancorous commander-in-chief paints a baseless picture of rigged, fraudulent results.“I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by. Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!” Trump tweeted on Friday.In a last-ditch effort for Republicans to hold onto the executive branch, Trump and his allies have already begun filing a firestorm of lawsuits around the election. But they’ve made little headway thus far.“If the number of contested ballots are not greater than the margin, courts are not eager to tear open an election,” although judicial scrutiny could actually address a “lingering cloud of illegitimacy” around the vote counts, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.If any of Trump’s legal challenges do find sympathy among Republican lawmakers and federal courts, that could cause a messy, fraught environment leading up to 20 January, when Biden is supposed to take office.But it’s more probable that Republicans will remain silent even if Trump continues to fuss and largely refuses to cooperate with Biden’s people in the interim, says Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University.“The difficulty with that is it just doesn’t give the new administration the best tools, the best information, and the best transition that we would hope for,” Zelizer says. But “my guess is Biden’s already expecting that”.Even as a lame duck, Trump could strategically force Democrats to oppose executive orders that underscore their party’s vulnerabilities ahead of runoff elections in Georgia that will determine who controls the US Senate, Turley says. If the outgoing administration does lean on executive orders, those can be dismantled by Biden.But after Democrats spent four years challenging whether Trump could rescind former president Barack Obama’s policies, Turley says, they’ve created a “precedent of their own making” against reversing such orders without long administrative slogs.Trump may use the power of the presidency to push for more conservative court appointments, another tax cut or environmental deregulations – measures to “remind Republicans of why a lot of Republicans voted for him”, says Zelizer, even as he exits the White House. Although he lost re-election, he still won more than 70m votes, and he could wield significant authority over his base for years to come.“He will continue to tell tens of millions of Americans that the Biden presidency is illegitimate, that essentially the Democrats have committed a coup,” Douglas says. “That could certainly pave the way for a resurgence of Trumpism, if not Trump himself in 2024.”Meanwhile, Biden may inherit a divided government that’s struggled to cooperate and compromise in recent years, shaken by a tumultuous transition.“He’s a decent person who genuinely will try to unite Americans,” Douglas says. “Now, whether he’ll be successful at doing that remains to be seen.” More