Trump, the music has changed

The Electoral College fulfilled its institutional task yesterday, officially certifying the results of the November 3 vote. And so once again we have confirmation that President-elect Joe Biden won the White House race and Donald Trump lost.

In this very special 2020, what should have been just a rite of passage, relegated to a brief story on the inside pages of newspapers, has become an important appointment. Reporters yesterday spent the day on Capitol Hill, chasing senators and deputies for comment: until the close of the day, and the recount. With 306 electoral votes, Biden is the 46th president-elect of the United States. Biden, not Trump.

With a speech with tones very different from those we have become accustomed to in the last four years, Biden spoke of solidarity and the need to start all together as a nation, in the face of the coronavirus emergency and launched arrows against the current. tenant of the White House. “The flame of democracy was lit in this nation many years ago and now we know that nothing, not a pandemic, not abuses of power, can extinguish it.”

We could look for signs of unity or commitment even in the opposite field from Biden, but we wouldn’t find them easily. President Trump and his supporters have spent the past 41 days trying to delegitimize the will of the voters, denying the defeat sanctioned by the ballot box. In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Trump said: “I am concerned about having an illegitimate president, a president who has lost: and he has lost a lot.”

Yesterday, as large voters cast their ballots at the polls in all 50 states, Trump remained silent: The AP news agency says he spent the day in the White House “often going to the dining room adjacent to the Oval Office to watch television and complaining that the televisions gave a lot of space to the confirmation process, while there were not enough people to support his thesis on air ”.

But in the Senate, Republican representatives began to embrace the new reality and party number two, John Thune of South Dakota, said that “at some point, you have to listen to the music that is playing around you.” What translated roughly means “it’s time to move on.”

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, very close to the powerful Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, for his part said that “there comes a time when you have to accept that despite all the efforts made, you have lost. There has to be a winner and a loser – then it seems to me that all of the president’s legal battles are over and that Joe Biden is about to become the next president. ”

Certainly not the concession speech that Americans and the world expected after more than a month. But that’s what you can expect from Trump’s world. As the president-elect said, and now officially confirmed, “the people voted. Trust in the institutions maintained. The integrity of our electoral system has remained intact, and that is why it is time to turn the page, to unite and move forward together ”.