Joe Biden has swept the popular vote, and is on the verge of claiming the electoral college. It’s a momentous achievement
Last modified on Sat 7 Nov 2020 06.38 AEDT
Barring
a twist inconceivable even by the standards of 2020, we will soon know
the result of the US presidential election – and it will almost
certainly be a cause for rejoicing. Donald Trump, the man who has
haunted the world’s dreams and sparked a thousand nightmares, has all
but lost. On 20 January 2021, he will probably leave the White House –
or be removed if necessary. The Trump presidency, a shameful chapter in
the history of the republic, will soon be over.
True, it is taking longer
than we might have liked. There was to be no swift moment of euphoria
and elation, an unambiguous landslide announced on election night with a
drumroll and fireworks display. Instead, thanks to a pandemic that
meant two in three Democrats voted by slower-to-count mail-in ballots,
it’s set to be a win in increments, a verdict delivered in slow motion.
Nor was there the hoped-for “blue wave” that might have carried the Democrats to a majority in the US Senate (though there is, just, a way that could yet happen).
As a result, it will be hard for Joe Biden to do what so urgently needs
to be done, whether that’s tackling the climate crisis, racial
injustice, economic inequality, America’s parlous infrastructure or its
dysfunctional and vulnerable electoral machinery. And it is glumly true
that even if Trump is banished from the Oval Office, Trumpism will live on in the United States.
And
yet none of that should obscure the main event that has taken place
this week. It’s a form of progressive masochism to search for the defeat
contained in a victory. Because a victory is what this will be.
Recall
the shock and disgust that millions – perhaps billions – have felt
these past four years, as Trump sank to ever lower depths. When he was
ripping children from their parents and keeping them in cages; when he
was blithely exchanging “love letters” with the murderous thug that
rules the slave state of North Korea; when he was coercing Ukraine to
dig up dirt on Biden, or else lose the funds it needed to defend itself
against Vladimir Putin, the high crime for which he was impeached;
when he was denying the reality of the coronavirus, insisting it would
just melt away, thereby leaving more than 235,000 Americans to their
fate and their deaths – when he was doing all that, what did his
opponents long for? The wish, sometimes uttered to the heavens, was not
complicated: they wanted Trump’s defeat and ejection from power. Few
attached the rider that it would only count if the Democrats could also
pick up a Senate seat in North Carolina.
Nor does it seem as
though any defeat for Trump will be tentative or partial, even if the
delayed result might make it feel that way. Joe Biden crushed him in
this contest. He beat him in the popular vote
by a huge margin, four million at last count, with that figure only
growing as the final result is tallied. Yes, in a high-turnout election,
Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 – but Biden got more votes
than any presidential candidate in history, more even than the
once-in-a-generation phenomenon that was Barack Obama.
What’s
more, Biden looks to have done something extremely difficult and
vanishingly rare, taking on and defeating a first-term president. That
would ensure that Donald Trump becomes only the third elected president
since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to try and fail
to win re-election. Trump would take his place alongside Jimmy Carter
and George Bush the elder in the small club of rejected, one-term
presidents. As it happens, both those men were gracious in defeat and
admirable in retirement, but Trump won’t see them that way. He’ll regard
them as stone-cold losers. And he’s about to be one of them, his place
taken by a decent, empathic man with the first ever female
vice-president at his side.
It’s
worth bearing all that in mind when you hear the predictable complaints
that Biden was too “centrist”, or that Bernie Sanders would have done
better. It could be argued that Biden outperformed the rest of his
party, pulling ahead even as Democrats lost seats in the House and
failed to make great gains in the Senate. Note that Trump’s prime attack line
– that “far left” Democrats were itching to impose “socialism” on
America – cut through in this campaign, clearly alarming Cuban and
Venezuelan voters in Florida, for example. But it was a hard label to
stick on a lifelong pragmatist like Joe Biden: most Americans just
didn’t buy it.
What it adds up to is not perhaps the
across-the-board repudiation of Trump and the congressional Republicans
who enabled him these past four years. But it does count as an emphatic
rejection of what Trump did as a first-term president – and, if it
holds, the prevention of all the horror he would have unleashed if he
had won a second.
It means that a majority of Americans have said
no to the constant stream of insults, abuse and lies – more than 22,000
since Trump took office, according to the Washington Post.
They have said no to a man who was a misinformation super-spreader, who
called journalists “enemies of the people” and denounced inconvenient
truths as “fake news”. They have said no to a man who suggested people
should guard against Covid by injecting themselves with disinfectant;
who dismissed science in favour of Fox News; who dismissed the word of
his own intelligence agencies, preferring conspiracy theories picked up
on Twitter.
They have said no to a president who saw white
supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville in 2017, and
declared that they included some “very fine people”. They have said no
to a man who referred to one black congresswoman as “low IQ” and
suggested four others, all US citizens, should “go back home”. They have
said no to the man who refused to disavow the far-right groups who
worship him, telling those racist extremists instead to “stand back and
stand by”. They have said no to the man who trashed America’s allies,
who withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement, and who grovelled
to every strongman and dictator on the planet.
The next few weeks
will be perilous. Trump will not concede; he will continue to deny the
legitimacy of this result. His performance on Thursday night was perhaps
his lowest and darkest yet, groundlessly telling Americans they could
have no faith in their most solemn democratic rite: the election of a
president. As he leaves, he will scorch the earth and poison the soil.
But
all of that is to remind us why it was so essential, for America and
the world, that he be defeated. And why, even though it may have arrived
slowly and without the fanfare so many of us wanted, this will be a
moment to savour. A dark force is being expelled from the most powerful
office in the world – and at long last, we can glimpse the light.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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