Rosie DiManno
And now, the hard part: undoing Trump’s damage in a deeply divided country,
WILMINGTON, DEL.— Make America America Again.
Recognizable to the world and to itself.
A great country, a beacon of democracy, emerging from the darkness of Trump l’oeil.
That is the urgent challenge for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., to bind a country’s wounds and unify its oppositional, confrontational parts.
After biding his time for more than three decades, twice rejected by his own party as Democratic nominee, bestirred from semi-retirement, the former senator and former vice-president has surmounted the heights of the Oval Office. No. 46, presumptively.
A sane and measured president after the hysterically unhinged autocracy of his conspiracy-cocooned predecessor, Donald J. Trump.
America will have a new commander-in-chief, grandfather-in-chief, healer-in-chief, reconciler-in-chief. All the roles Biden must embrace in these end days of Trumpism leading to inauguration on Jan. 20, when Biden will be 78, oldest president ever. Till then, the mad sitting president in the attic, still dropping bomblets of defiance and laying down fire for a scorched earth resistance, imperiling peaceful transfer of power.
There was dancing in the streets from coast to coast on Saturday as the inevitable was confirmed and called. Such a marvellous spectacle of jubilation following months and months of protests, all the days of rage as the United States became embroiled in dissent and rioting, coalescing around — or against — Black Lives Matter.
Still a deeply polarized America, where some 71 million citizens voted for Trump, though it was mostly quiet on the mutinous front of everTrumpers and never-Bidens.
Finally, on Day 5 of this interminable election, the crucial tumbler locked into place — Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral college votes — unlocking the White House. And no scale-proof fence can prevent Biden from occupying it, with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, first biracial and female Veep in the country’s history.
The celebrations unfolded against the backdrop of a country stung and bruised by an election campaign that brought out both the best and worst of its people.
Fusion, welding together its disparate and mutually distrusting factions, was the theme when Scranton-born, Delaware-raised Biden spoke to the nation from the Chase Center here on Saturday evening — a drive-in (and spill out) event of 360 vehicles — on what was the 48th anniversary of winning his senate seat for the first time, mere weeks before the death in a car crash of his first wife and baby daughter.
“Folks, the people of this nation have spoken, they’ve delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory, a victory for we the people,” Biden said to raucous cheering after being introduced by an ivory-suited Harris. “We’ve won with the most votes ever cast for a presidential ticket in the history of the nation — 74 million.
“Though I must admit it surprised me tonight, we’re seeing all over this nation, all cities in all parts of the country, indeed across the world, an outpouring of joy, of hope, renewed faith in tomorrow being a better day. And I’m humbled by the trust and confidence you’ve placed in me. I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify, who doesn’t see red states and blue states, always sees the united states. I’ll work with all my heart … to win the confidence of all people.”
The humble is so palpably genuine, the antithesis of Trump.
Top of the agenda, appointing a coronavirus task force on Monday, in a country where COVID-19 has taken 237,000 lives.
“I will spare no effort to turn around this pandemic.” A pandemic that Trump scarcely acknowledged.
It was an inclusive message, which doubtless went right over the head of Trump. As had Biden’s statement of gratitude to the electorate earlier in the day. The sitting president was on the golf course when the long-awaited news broke. He quickly blasted out a statement of his own, typically toxic.
“We all know Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him. They don’t want the truth to be exposed.”
It is Trump who has exposed himself for the zillionth time as a man of no decency, no morals and definitely no grace in defeat. He has always lived in an alternate reality world, a super-spreader of fake news.
The sitting president’s puppet and personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani — oh how far he’s fallen since he was anointed Mayor of America during the 9/11 crisis — said in Philadelphia of Trump: “Obviously he’s not going to concede.”
Nevada had fallen into the Biden column. Arizona had fallen into the Biden column. Georgia had fallen into the Biden column — albeit in so tight a race that the Peace State will undergo a recount and senatorial runoff, which could decide whether Republicans will retain control.
But Pennsylvania was the big prize. Fitting too that the tale of the tape was stretched across Philadelphia, crucible of American democracy. Along with Wisconsin and Michigan, Biden had resurrected the Blue Wall that had been knocked down by Trump’s wrecking ball four years ago against Hillary Clinton.
The drip-drip-drip of county returns had accumulated over the previous four days, while a country on the razor’s edge was a-roil with anxiety.
However exasperatingly, with some ugly episodes of intimidation outside counting offices across the country, the system worked. Democracy, which the autocratic Trump had turned on its head, worked. Even as Trump’s legal functionaries churned out more lawsuits. Even as Trump spokesfolks continued to avow that “the election is not over,” Matt Morgan, lawyer for the Trump camp had warned on Friday: “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
To which the Biden camp retorted in a statement of its own: “The United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
Imagine that — the huckster populist Trump being forcemarched out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s not beyond the range of possibility.
The trajectory of voting couldn’t be wiped off the election graphs.
A nation now turns its squinty eyes to Biden. An exhausted, jangly with discord, deeply riven nation. With a usurped incumbent doubling down, imploring his base to “DEFEND YOUR PRESIDENT!”
What does that even mean? What devilment is Trump fostering? Perhaps to embolden and rouse the never-Bidens, the ever-Trumpers, in their convoys of pickup trucks, bristling with weaponry. Like the white supremacist Proud Boys whom Trump had directed, a month ago, to “stand by.”
This election is, to a large extent, more about the delusional loser than the valiant winner. Buy time, buy delay, buy litigation, buy murk. Nourish doubt, pump up the volume on alleged malfeasance in the absence of any evidence. But the by-hook or by-crook president had bull-horned that intention for months.
The landscape, with troughs of division, is troubling. It will be a long while before the dust settles, before the rancour subsides. Biden, a moderate and centrist — in a country that has always been historically centre-right — will have his hands full, once the euphoria subsides, knitting together the vying sections of his own party, with liberals to the left of him and moderates to the right of him.
The latter has blamed the former for pulling the party to an extreme from which it could not win; the politics of identity and an emphasis on social issues, particularly the dimly viewed defunding of police. Democrats lost at least four seats in the House and the finger has been pointed at The Squad in particular — Representatives Alexandria OcasioCortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley — although they all won their seats. But it was easy for Republicans to paint them, and by extension their party, as radical socialists, which doubtless scared off a chunk of Middle America.
Biden’s win was not by knockout punch, not quite a thumping and full-throat repudiation of Trump’s ugly policies; more a flurry of jabs that pushed Trump against the ropes.
Whatever the electoral tally, Red America still worships at the altar of Trump, admiring of the destructive cyclone of his administration. He took the Republican Party hostage — senators and congress members apparently seized by Stockholm Syndrome — and he won’t relinquish it, possibly eyeballing another run in 2024, rather than fade into the history books as an aberration, a four-year horror when America was in thrall to his demagoguery.
Trump performed well in white, rural counties, depressed areas, the exurbs. He performed surprisingly well among the Latino constituency — more than one-third of Hispanic men cast their ballots for Trump, according to an exit poll by Edison Research. And, inexplicable, he got 18 per cent of the Black male vote.
This is the morass that Biden has inherited and which he’ll have to navigate, a task not made that much easier despite a record 75 million votes.
Politically, Biden is a gut politician who rejects tribalism, a moderate on the Democratic spectrum, a conciliator whose trump card in the Senate was the ability to carve out compromises by reaching across the aisle. Except that aisle is now a chasm.
He does possess the skill, the innate decency, to inspire alliance, qualities that convicted President Obama to choose him as a vice-president, despite having nothing in common.
There’s an anecdote about Obama and Biden having lunch one day, as disclosed by The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos. Obama said to Biden: “You and I are becoming good friends! I find that very surprising.’’
Joe: “You’re f---ing surprised!’’
This election is, to a large extent, more about the delusional loser than the valiant winner