Trump switched off the CNN results show and gazed over the White House lawn. It was time to formulate a smooth handover of power to that nice Mr Biden
I hate explaining to you, the lovely reader, how things work behind the curtain. I like you to think I write this column first thing on a Sunday morning, just hours before you’re enjoying it over your bacon roll/ porridge/scrambled eggs.
The reality, of course, is that it needs to be delivered a bit sooner than that, so the good people at the Sunday Mail can do their fine work: checking my spelling, finding suitable photos to go with whatever nonsense I’ve written and (most importantly) fact-checking some of my wilder outbursts to make sure I don’t get us into any legal trouble, something my editors have traditionally been very good at.
With all of this in mind, I’ll tend to write it on either a Thursday afternoon or a Friday morning. On rare occasions, especially if there’s an unfolding news story that affects it, I will sometimes finish as late as Friday afternoon.
So you can imagine this week’s scenario. There I was, looking at the US election happening on Tuesday and thinking, ‘ Well, I’ll have plenty of time to think about the results and come up with what the young folks call a “hot take”.’
Tuesday came and went. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday. And here we are on Friday afternoon – still with no definitive winner. I have now watched four straight days of CNN. I have saluted the inexhaustible numbers machine that is John King, who stands there looking like the head of menswear in a 1970s department store as he calmly crunches statistics and probabilities.
I have become more familiar with obscure parts of Georgia and Arizona than I ever wanted to be, places called ObiWanKenobi Country and Krankowaski Falls and Butt’s Gorge. And, like all of us, I have marvelled at the number of adverts for medicines and re-mortgages Americans seem to need on their TVs. (And at the number of 1980s acting icons they need to sell this stuff: Tom Selleck, James Earl Jones etc all flogging heart pills, cheap loans and bibles.)
And, in between the adverts, I watched as Donald Trump’s initial lead crumbled away to nothing.
Trump stood up on Wednesday and – like a tinpot dictator in a banana republic – just declared victory for himself. He stood up again the following day (as the results got worse for him) and repeated the claim, adding (without evidence) that he believed the election was fraudulent and was being stolen. Trump’s main reason for this is that postal ballots were overwhelmingly overwhelm favouring
Democrats. Democra How could this be?
Well, Wel Don, maybe you shouldn’t shou have spent weeks telling telli all of your supporters not to vote by post.
And A Democrat voters – unlike unl Trumpers – were inclined incl not to go to polling polli stations because they overwhelming believe coronavirus is real. By the end of Friday (and picture me typing frantically), Biden was within a breath of winning the 270 votes needed to win the presidency. He was ahead in the remaining key states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. The Trump campaign then issued a statement saying that they did not accept the results and would be mounting legal challenges in any state they lost in.
Whatever. By the time you’re reading this on Sunday morning,
Joe Biden will very likely be the legal President Elect. Where does this leave us? Thankfully, we don’t have to guess. Trump has told us.
When he lost a Republican primary four years ago, he said it had been “rigged” against him. When he didn’t win an Emmy for The Apprentice, it was because the Emmys were
“rigged” against him. When a judge ruled his Trump University was just a con-job, preying on the weak and vulnerable, Trump said it was rigged because the judge was Mexican so was obviously biased against him.
As this week wore on and his “lawsuits” all got thrown out over the country, Trump became increasingly unhinged. No significant Republican appeared on TV or on social media to defend him. Like a lobotomised King Lear, even his daughter had abandoned him. Ivanka stayed silent.
All he had in his corner by Friday were his idiot sons Don Jr and Eric (both increasingly looking like they hadn’t slept in days and had been living on chemicals and whisky) and his “lawyer” Rudy Giuliani, the kind of guy who got fooled by Borat. Yes, this is a trio of utter buffoons. No, they don’t have any credibility with sane people. But they do all have huge microphones in front of them. And the insane people are listening…
Because of the incredible damage of his childhood (the cold, distant mother, the vicious, domineering father), Trump cannot psychically admit defeat. To do so would cause his mind to fall apart. He will never make a concession speech. Will never attend Biden’s inauguration. Will never, ever graciously and peacefully hand over power. So here’s three ways it might play out in the coming weeks…
● Trump puts together a bogus lawsuit to take to the Supreme Court, where the three judges he considers “his” (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) rule in his favour and overturn the will of the people to fraudulently hand Trump the election. In which case the country goes up in flames.
● Trump’s “lawsuit” is so bogus that it either doesn’t get near the Supreme Court or it does but it is immediately tossed out. Trump then spends his last 10 weeks in office encouraging his supporters to smash the country up and frantically trying to undo every last thing Obama ever did.
● Biden’s electoral college victory is so convincing that no lawyer or Republican will stand with Trump. He resigns in fury and disgust, handing over to Mike Pence as caretaker president before he slumps off to Mar-a-Lago and begins whipping his followers up into a frenzy of violence. The country goes up in flames.
You’ll notice there isn’t a single scenario here where incredible damage isn’t inflicted on the people and the prestige of the USA. Because I can’t think of one. Hold tight.
Trump stood up and - like a tinpot dictator in a banana republic - declared victory for himself