After four agonizing days and nights of needing just one or two more states to make it past the Electoral College-mandated 270 mark, former Vice President Joe Biden finally passed that hurdle when the TV networks declared him the winner in Pennsylvania Saturday morning. He will become the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021. Senator Kamala Harris of California becomes the first woman and person of color to be Vice President.
The votes are still being counted as of November 7 in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia with Biden in the lead. But Pennsylvania was the big prize with 20 electoral votes. Biden won more popular votes than anyone in history with more than 74 million.
Donald Trump becomes the first President since 1992 to be defeated for a second term. For a man who's used to "so much winning", as he might have put it, he's not handling losing very well. His nationally-televised rants about Democrats committing voter fraud and threats of suing his way to a second term, possibly all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, did nothing but paint him as a desperate old man clinging to the spotlight. And what was he doing when Biden was announced as the winner? Playing golf, which is a typical move whenever the President wants to get away from reality. Conceding? Are you kidding?
But Trump won over 70 million votes, and if that doesn't tell you how divided the United States is right now, I don't know what will. Seems there are a lot more folks outside his political base who liked how he's handled the coronavirus pandemic (which is currently near ten million cases and over 236,000 dead, with the worst still to come), the pre-Covid economy and other kinds of behavior unbecoming a President. If Trump had so much as taken the pandemic seriously, not only would he have saved a lot of lives, but he would have won a second term too.
As it stands, Biden won because people got sick of all the lies, all the racism, all the tweeting, all the corruption, all the nepotism, all the spinelessness of the GOP, all the ignoring of his Western allies and coddling of dictators, and, most importantly, ALL TRUMP ALL THE TIME. By contrast, Biden has been in and out of public office for nearly 50 years and seems to know how to deal with the world. He may be older than Trump (78 by inauguration), but he's exactly what America needs right now. Boring but competent.
Now that it's all over but the pouting, the next three months should be interesting. As President-elect Biden and his transition team hit the ground running, what will President Trump be doing in the days before his TV show of an administration goes off the air? Will he cooperate with Biden's team? Will he fire everyone right and left? Will he find a way to stay out of prison? Or will he simply fade into America's collective rear view mirror?
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