Game almost over for Trump
Biden leading in Georgia, Pennsylvania Only a miracle can save the incumbent president from losing Trump campaign not willing to concede defeat Fraud claims draw flak but stoke unrest among Republican base
Democrat Joe Biden was on the brink of winning the White House on Friday after taking the lead in the potentially decisive state of Pennsylvania but President Donald Trump showed no signs of being ready to concede and his campaign insisted the bitterly contested race is “not over”.
Pennsylvania, and its 20 electoral votes, would be enough to vault the 77-year-old Biden past the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College, which determines the presidency.
With tens of thousands of votes remaining to be counted in Pennsylvania, many from heavily Democratic areas, Biden opened up a 13,000-vote lead over the Republican incumbent, according to real-time state election results.
Biden currently has at least 253 electoral votes and is leading in three other states — Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — where ballots from Tuesday’s bitterly contested election continue to be counted.
While his reelection hopes may be fading, Trump is making it clear that he is not ready to accept defeat, launching unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud during an extraordinary White House appearance on Thursday and claiming that he had actually won.
“This election is not over,” the Trump campaign’s general counsel Matt Morgan said after news of Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania broke.
“The false projection of Joe
Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final,” Morgan said in a statement. “Biden is relying on these states for his phony claim on the White House, but once the election is final, President Trump will be re-elected.”
Morgan alleged there had been “improperly cast” ballots in Georgia, where a recount was expected, and Nevada and claimed Republican vote-counting observers
had been denied access in Pennsylvania.
With a Biden victory looking increasingly likely, the US Secret Service increased its protective bubble around the former vicepresident, sending an extra squad of agents to his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, The Washington Post reported on Friday.
Several prominent Republicans rallied behind the president and
signalled they could challenge the legitimacy of the results if he loses.
“I think everything should be on the table,” Senator Lindsey Graham said when asked by Fox News host and Trump loyalist Sean Hannity if Pennsylvania’s Republican-led legislature should refuse to certify results. “Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake,” Graham said. —
The much-anticipated US election turned out to be a suspense thriller with the news anchors plotting various combination of wins in states for the contestants — President Donald Trump and former vice-president Joe Biden. As we write this, no clear winner has emerged with postal ballots still being counted at a slow pace in the remaining four deciding states. But the narrow path for the incumbent president is slowly closing by the hour.
As we look back on the last four years, we can definitely say Trump has left a mark with his unique brand of showmanship. He was more of an entertainer than a politician as he brought his reality TV experience to the White House job. He has a very personalised approach to matters of state craft after eight years of clinical method to issues by his cerebral predecessor Barack Obama. His warmth and conviviality were much in evidence as he forged a personal relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The fact this diplomacy did not go far enough to achieve the stated objectives is another story.
Trump’s style does not conform m to any pre-existing models. He follows ws his own personal predilections and d idiosyncrasies. He does not play by the rules and sets his own for others to follow. So, it has been a roller-coaster ride at the White House with so many officials leaving their jobs after failing to cope with his mercurial ways.
Based on the initial results when he was leading in most of f the crucial states, Trump came in front of the press and claimed victoctory. He repeated his allegation all mailedin ballots were a fraud and an attempt to steal the election.
Trump, being what he is, can never accept the idea of losing. Loser is a word that he reserves for the worst people on the earth. If he does not like you, he will call you a loser. In his world view, success in life is all about winning. He cannot stand the thought of joining the ranks of losers.
He is supposed to have called the American soldiers who died in wars as losers, according to an Atlantic report. So, Trump will never accept the fact that he has lost the election. He will forever be in denial and will blame fake news media and deep state for stealing an election that he has won. He will live in an alternative universe where his legitimate election has been unfairly stolen from him by fraud and cheating.
The idea of defeat rankles him so much that he once went to the extent of saying he will leave the country if Joe Biden is elected president. He thinks he cannot live in a country run by a loser who stole the win from him.
Another thing he loathes is the idea of a onetime presidency. He does not want to join the ranks of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. He reserved particularly harsh words for them, once calling Carter a terrible president.
American presidents inhabit the mind space of billions of people all over the world like no other. Sometimes the presidents and the prime ministers of their own country do not exercise their minds so
Trump loathes the idea of a one-time presidency. He does not want to join the ranks of Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. He reserved particularly harsh words for them, once calling Carter a terrible president
much. In a pl place that I come from — Telangana, India — every educated family can boast of someone who was either studying or working in the land of opportunity. Last time when I was in India, I saw even my village folks discussing Trump and the impact his politics will have on the Indians living there.
My hometown Hyderabad would not have been the booming city it is now but for the hundreds of thousands outsourcing jobs shipped from the US. So, the lives of millions all over the world are tied up with the US economy and politics. So worldwide anxiety about the elections is understandable.
Trump has a phenomenal energy for a 74-yearold. He exudes the enthusiasm and physical strength of a 40-year-old with the mindset of a teenager raring for a fight in the school yard. He called Jeb Bush a low-energy guy in the run-up to the 2016 elections. The Bush scion could never come out of that blow and his much-fancied presidential bid ran aground. He never lost an opportunity to heap insults on the “sleepy Joe”. In one of the election meetings, the incumbent president said Biden was choking like a dog at the first presidential debate, indirectly telling the world he is too old to run for the office. A 74-year-old pointing fingers at a 77-year-old is indeed comical. But that is par for course for Donald Trump.
Trump acts and looks like a simpleton. But he is shrewd enough to understand the resentment boiling underneath. The unstated ethnic identity of the North American country has become contested due to vast migration of diverse ethnic people in search of economic opportunity. The US is essentially a collection of people of European descent with a sizeable minority of Black people inherited from the tainted slave history and a tiny number of indigenous Indians. The European Whites, who think the country is theirs, started feeling insecure due to steady migration of people of other ethnicities changing the demographics of the country. At the moment, reliable data sources put the White population at 67% of the total. The projection that the White population will fall below 50 per cent by 2045 has only accentuated the resentment.
Mike Huckabee, the celebrated conservative and a Republican presidential aspirant, once complained the country is “no longer looking like ours”. Resentment among the Whites has been building up for a while. Trump saw an opportunity in this and started tapping that anger to fuel his political career. He has put the immigration issue front and centre and did whatever he can to stop the flow of migrants, both legal and illegal, during the last four years. He began constructing physical barriers along the southern border to stop “caravans” of illegal migrants.
The kind of traction he has got in this election despite his pathetic handling of the pandemic can only be attributed to the sense of solidarity shown by the White majority.