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On Tuesday, the world will witness a country more divided and angry than at any time since the Vietnam War era in the 1970s.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden fought Monday until the eve of an election threatened by legal chaos and fears of violence after Trump, at the polls and with only hours to go, pushed hard. to discredit the United States voting process.
On Tuesday, the world will witness a country more divided and angry than at any time since the Vietnam War era in the 1970s.
Across central Washington, businesses closed windows in anticipation of rioting, and NBC News reported that a new “impossible to climb” fence was planned around the White House, which has been behind increasing layers of fortifications since one summer. of protests against racism.
While the Trump administration warned of left-wing extremists wreaking havoc, the president’s supporters made their own show of force, driving in caravans of flagged pickup trucks and blocking roads across the country.
The FBI said it was investigating an incident in Texas where Trump supporters in trucks swarmed around a Biden campaign bus while it was on a highway.
Tuesday is formally Election Day, but in reality it only marks the culmination of a long election month.
With a large expansion in voting by mail to protect against the COVID-19 pandemic, it is estimated that more than 95 million people have already cast their votes, highlighting the raw passion in what is becoming a referendum on the first Republican term to break the rules. .
After a four-year rollercoaster ride, roughly half the country views the 74-year-old Trump as a historic threat whose nationalist policies, rude manners and alleged corruption have pushed the United States to the brink.
And the other half, evidenced in Trump’s raucous demonstrations and chants of “we love you,” sees in him a unique champion fighting for the working class and a bulwark against rapidly advancing liberal social values.
Biden, who is ahead of the polls in nearly all the changing states that tip elections, was closing his surprisingly low-key campaign with socially estranged events in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the fiercest battlefield of all.
Pop superstar Lady Gaga would be joining the 77-year-old, while former President Barack Obama was lending his own political star power by joining Biden in Florida and Georgia, a stable Republican state targeted by Democrats.
Trump, who scoffs at Biden’s modest attendance at events as proof that opinion polls must be wrong, was limiting his rise to 14 rallies in three days with visits to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The last rally will be in Grand Rapids, the site where Trump delivered the final speech of his victorious 2016 campaign and where he hopes to once again provoke a surprise.
TRUMP ATTACKS THE INTEGRITY OF THE ELECTIONS
No election has been held in living memory amid so much tension, combining the coronavirus pandemic, violent street protests, a record shift toward vote-by-mail ballots, and increasingly unprecedented attempts by Trump. to discredit the workings of American democracy.
The president, who for months has been falsely claiming that mail-in ballots will lead to massive fraud, upped the ante in recent days by suggesting that he will push to disqualify votes that come in after Tuesday, a practice that is legal in several of key states, as long as ballots are postmarked on time.
Coupled with Republican attempts to get a court to cast more than 100,000 ballots in Texas and other aggressive legal measures, Trump’s hostility to electoral rules is raising fears that he will try to declare a premature victory or refuse to accept defeat.
Because mail-in ballots are believed to be more likely to come from Democrats, while in-person voting on Tuesday is more likely to be Republican, the initial vote count on Election Night may lean toward Trump, while the post count could, in theory, oscillate. go back to Biden.
News site Axios reported Sunday that Trump had told confidants that he would declare victory immediately if it seemed he was going ahead.
Trump called it a “false report,” but repeated his argument that “I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait a long period of time after the election.”
And he has stated that he will challenge the validity of the ballots in Pennsylvania immediately. “As soon as the elections are over, we will go to our lawyers,” he said Sunday.
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