▪ It's become obvious that trump has read the writing on the wall.
Democrat Joe Biden and U.S. President Donald Trump campaigned in Pennsylvania on Monday.
WILMINGTON, DEL.—The Amtrak depot was formally renamed the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station in 2011.
Amtrak Joe, so known for all the years he spent schlepping daily between Wilmington and Washington, D.C., as a U.S. senator. Ninety-minute commute each way.
How likely — unlikely — that any public building will ever be named for Donald J. Trump, apart from the towers on which he slapped his own moniker. Some tenants have gone to court to have the branding removed. Apart, as well, from the presidential library that presumably will be erected at some point down the road, as all but two presidents since Herbert Hoover has been commemorated.
Presidential libraries are intended as repositories to preserve papers, records, collections and historical materials of individuals who’ve occupied the Oval Office.
Seriously, what would a Trump Library contain? Maybe his tax records, still not publicly disclosed. Or shelves full of his ghosted biography, “The Art of the Deal,” possibly the only book cracked open by a president who famously doesn’t read.
Inside the convenience store at the railway station here, a table — separated into two exactingly divided surfaces — is covered with Trump and Biden kitsch. Everything 50 per cent off. “Nobody wants to buy any of it,” says the cashier.
One day out from the election — arguably the most crucial American election of our lifetime — and already a clearance sale. Commuters can apparently do just fine without collecting a Trump mug or a Biden fridge magnet, even though the former vice-president is beloved in the state he represented for 36 years in the upper chamber.
Gentleman Joe, Ordinary Joe, just a guy called Joe. Which is a humble trope and, while truthful in character, belies the fact that Biden has been a political animal for nearly 50 of his 77 years. The man who, as a boy at Holy Rosary in Scranton, told the nuns that he was going to be president one day. Stuttered it out, actually, because that was his mortifying impedimenta — another nickname hung on him by classmates — which he spent years fighting to overcome.
Scranton is, interestingly, where Trump blew through on Monday, among a five-stop blitzkrieg in four states on the cusp of election day, Pennsylvania believed to be crucial for the fortune of both candidates. Trump took the state by less than a one per cent edge in votes in 2016, as the Blue Wall of sturdy Democratic states collapsed on Hillary Clinton.
Reaching for the support of blue collar workers and suburbanites without a college degree — the rump that boosted him four years ago — Trump seized the opportunity to yet again bang the drum about election fraud, despite no evidence to buttress the claim, continuing to pre-emptively lay the ground for a legal challenge of the result.
In typically disjointed oratory: “I think it’s a terrible thing when … we’re going into the night of, as soon as the election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”
Further: “Do you know what can happen? Number one, cheating can happen like you’ve never seen. This is their dream.”
The Republicans are, among their other legal gambits, attempting to limit the counting of ballots after election day. A three-day extension was ordered by Pennsylvania’s top court; the Supreme Court refused to block it. Some counties in the Keystone State — with its 20 electoral votes — have said they won’t even start opening ballots until Wednesday morning.
“I think it’s a terrible decision by the Supreme Court, a terrible decision,” Trump bellowed.
On Monday, the Republican party’s legal pit bulls lost cases to limit or toss out ballots in two other battleground states also, Texas and Nevada.
The incumbent’s campaign has taken unprecedented steps to suppress voting wherever they can find a slippery legal footing and, in some cases, with the help of Republican governors who’ve made ballotbox early voting a bitch.
Frenzy of last-minute blitzing notwithstanding, it’s become increasingly obvious Trump has read the writing on the wall, if pollsters are to be believed: He’s a dead man walking. A loser. The one thing his ego can’t abide. One outlandish maniacal term and begone.
Biden, travelling to all four corners of Pennsylvania also — 2.2 million Pennsylvanians have already voted by mail or in person — and Ohio, retorted: “America will be heard. When America is heard, I believe the message will be loud and clear. It’s time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go. We’re done.”
Oh, Trump has also indicated he intends to axe Dr. Anthony Fauci, amid a pandemic that’s brought America to its knees.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he said to a crowd roaring “Fire Fauci!” at a Sunday rally that went past midnight, “but let me wait till a little bit after the election.”
Adding to the short-strokes chaos strategy, there are inside-the-beast reports Trump will unilaterally declare himself a winner on Tuesday night, even before the returns have been tallied, should the outcome look close. Trump has denied that as fake news. Liar, liar, pants on fire.
The sitting president has scarcely set foot in Delaware, which is indisputably Biden territory. Delawareans are proprietary about their Joe, whom they’ve seen through Shakespearean grief and resurrection, now — on his third stab at the presidency — on the verge, it appears, of crossing the White House threshold as No. 1, four years removed from being No. 2 to Barack Obama.
They’ve run into him at the Home Depot, in church, at the mall, at the local peach festival, the train station. They’re more likely to greet him as Hey Joe than Sen. Biden. They knew his dad, his siblings, his kids.
Mary Harnett, 72, told the News Journal recently about that time, way back in 1977, when a mugger tried to snatch her purse as she was going home after church. Biden, driving by, jumped out of the car and hotfooted it in pursuit of the culprit, running through backyards and scaling fences — like the lettered athlete he once was. Although Biden didn’t catch the thief, the man dropped the purse. Harnett said she sealed the pocketbook in plastic next day and stored it in a cedar chest.
“I really thought some day he would become president and I would get him to sign it.”
Amtrak Joe was the sobriquet Biden earned because people could set their watch by his arrival and departure from the station.
At first, the then-senator stuck with the practice because he was a widowed father with two traumatized young sons, Beau and Hunter, who’d lost their mother and baby sister in a car crash a week before Christmas, 1972. Neilia Hunter had taken her children to buy a tree. The boys were severely injured and Biden wouldn’t leave their bedside, even to be sworn into the senate. When he brought them home, he made sure to be with the youngsters every night for dinner. Later, even after remarrying, buying a sprawling new home in the upscale suburb of Greenville, he maintained the routine because it was just his thing.
Biden has been scarred by suffering and grief, as everyone knows. The death of Neilia and baby Naomi shattered him. Suicide crossed his mind but he couldn’t do that to the boys. For a while, he lost his faith; the Catholic Church had been the backbone of his existence.
“I began to understand how despair led people to just cash it in; how suicide wasn’t just an option but a rational option,” Biden wrote in his autobiography, “Promises to Keep.” “But I’d look at Beau and Hunter asleep and wonder what new terrors their own dreams held, and wonder who would explain to my sons my being gone, too. And I knew I had no choice but to fight to stay alive.”
Fight he did, 16 years later, after bowing out of the 1988 presidential campaign, plagued by accusations of plagiarism in a stump speech and resurfacing allegations of plagiarizing a law school paper, his reputation in tatters. For months he’d functioned despite agonizing headaches. He carried around a large bottle of Tylenol, persevering, in his role as chair of the Senate judiciary committee, overseeing the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Robert
Bork. (Biden is credited with dismantling the controversial Bork in those hearings.)
What Biden had, in fact, was two brain aneurysms that almost cost him his life before he was rushed into emergency surgery. That experience, he’s said, shaped him into “the kind of man I want to be” — stripped of the arrogance that had tarnished his character, annealed in the forge of lifethreatening illness.
Five years ago, having wellserved Obama as Veep — a yin-yang relationship, with Biden the eminence grise to the young president, particularly in the area of foreign affairs, persuaded to take the historically thankless VP job by his wife, Jill — Biden thought he was ready to take another shot at the top job. But he’d just lost his son, Beau, to brain cancer, and was reeling emotionally. Beau Biden had been an army officer and later Delaware attorney-general. Beau was 42 when he died and on that day, his father wrote: “It happened. My God, my boy. My beautiful boy.”
So, in the Rose Garden on Oct. 21, 2015, with Obama at his side, Biden announced that he would not run for president. (Although, to this day, he insists he would have beaten Trump in ’16.)
Biden was enraged when a bombshell story in The Atlantic revealed that the commander-in-chief had referred to fallen and captured U.S. service members as “losers’’ and “suckers.”
On Monday, he strafed Trump anew for that. “My son was the attorney-general of Delaware, he gave up his seat to go fight in Iraq for a year, he was awarded the bronze medal, he came home and died of cancer. Guess what? He was no loser.”
This election is, Biden has stressed time and again, “a battle for the soul of this nation.”
That’s not just rhetoric. The world is watching, fingers crossed.
Election eve ended for Biden in Pittsburgh, at a drive-in rally with Lady Gaga. Or, as Trump calls her, the anti-fracker. (“Now he’s got Lady Gaga — Lady Gaga,” Trump snorted in Avoca, Penn. “I could tell you stories about Lady Gaga. I know a lot of stories — Lady Gaga.”)
Biden: “Tomorrow we can put an end to a president that has fanned the flames of hate across this nation, pouring gasoline on every racial incident across this country. My message is simple: The power to change this country is in your hands.”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.