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Last week, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers pointed out that the president has no plans to leave the White House.
“We are moving forward here in the White House under the assumption that there will be a second term from Trump,” Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser, said in an interview with Fox Business Channel. This came days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said essentially the same thing.
Although President Trump refuses to budge, the 2020 presidential election is over. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris clearly won in a close election, regaining states that Hillary Clinton lost four years ago. It appears that Democrats garnered enough independent support in an election that increased voter turnout, and this during a pandemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
A strange election season
The 2020 election season has been tumultuous in the United States. There have been so many subplots that sometimes it’s hard to follow all the twists. From the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just six weeks before the election, until the New York Times obtained the president’s tax returns showing he barely paid, to a plot by the right-wing militia. To kidnap a sitting governor in Michigan, it was a strange election season, to say the least.
“And then the President ends up at Walter Reed Hospital with the same illness that he called a hoax, it’s almost as if each of these stories could turn an election on its own,” said Trevor Potter, former Election Commissioner and President. United States Federal. Commission.
“The reality is that if you put all of this together in a description of a novel, the publisher will give it back to you and tell you that it is too incredible, that you may have some of these, but not all of these in your book.”
In line behind Biden
Fault lines began covering this year’s elections in South Carolina during an intense Democratic primary in late February.
At the time, Joe Biden was far behind in the polls, but he used a strategy that relied on black voters in Palmetto State to catapult him to the forefront of the race. Our team was present at a Biden rally the day he received the endorsement of a powerful party broker, Congressman Jim Clyburn, who breathed new life into his campaign.
“I hadn’t planned on running again. What made me realize that something had to happen was when I saw those people come out of the Charlottesville fields carrying torches, “Biden told a small crowd in a historic hall in Georgetown, South Carolina.
“When the press asked him [Trump] “What do you think, Mr. President?” He said, “there are very good people on both sides.” No president has ever made that moral equivalence. That’s when I realized it was much deeper. “
The Democratic establishment quickly came in line behind Biden after he easily won the state and propelled him to the nomination with a commanding performance on Super Tuesday.
‘Trumpism will not disappear with Donald Trump’
The general election showed us that President Trump remains extremely popular with a wide swath of the American electorate, winning more than 70 million votes in his losing effort. The phenomenon it spawned, sometimes referred to as “Trumpism,” doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
A Donald Trump supporter wears a Donald Trump mask on the Rappahannock River in Urbanna, Virginia on September 26. [Josh Rushing/Al Jazeera]
“Trumpism will not disappear with Donald Trump, Trumpism will not disappear, it will return in a few years in a new form,” explained Thomas Frank, who writes on American politics and culture.
“If you come back with someone smarter at the head of the movement, someone who doesn’t gratuitously insult people or brag about how they have abused women, Trumpism could be very difficult to defeat.”
For the moment, the president seems determined to stay where he is in the White House and spread a false narrative that his election was stolen. He is raising money from his multitudes of supporters who will fill the coffers of his Super PAC “Save America” and the Republican Party.
The keys to the republican party
The Republican Party has essentially handed over the party keys to Trump. At this year’s convention, for the first time since the party was founded in the 1850s, he decided not to adopt a political platform, but instead supported what he called Trump’s America First agenda.
“It was truly unprecedented because party politics is one of the central institutions of American democracy,” explained Jennifer Nicoll Victor, professor of political science at George Mason University.
“It points to the weakness of the Republican Party, which would give up that four-year power to articulate a platform, but it also speaks to the way that President Trump has really captured the Republican Party in a remarkable way.”
‘We need a psychic political breakdown’
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are moving forward in their effort to build a transition team to prepare for a number of challenges next year when they take office.
A Joe Biden supporter speaks outside an early voting site in Fairfax, Virginia, on September 24. [Josh Rushing/Al Jazeera]
There are still two Senate races in Georgia heading for a runoff in January. The results will determine whether Republicans can maintain control of the Senate, which could make it difficult for the Biden administration to get things done in Washington.
As another wave of the coronavirus spreads across the country, the White House will have a number of challenges left by the Trump administration that a new administration will need to address.
“America just got this funny thing, we’re always in a crisis to some degree, we’re always in a battle for this democracy,” said the Rev. William Barber, a political and spiritual activist with the Poor People’s Campaign.
“But, right now, we need a psychic break. We have some things we have to do after all the votes have been counted during election season, but we need a psychic political break from what we see now. “
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