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07:06
At Donald Trump’s final rally of the 2020 campaign, thousands of supporters trudged through muddy fields and waited in endless lines to hear the president speak, on the eve of what could be his defeat, or the start of another four years. .
Trump delivered his speech at midnight in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a critical state in which the president expects a repeat of what happened in 2016, when he unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton.
In the dark when temperatures dropped to 40 ° F (4 ° C), Trump supporters were optimistic, but many also said they expected riots in the wake of the election.
“There will be violence either way,” whether Trump or Biden win, said Angela Young, 43. As a small-town Michigan gun owner, she said, she wasn’t worried about her personal safety. But the prospect of election-related violence in the United States was “downright unacceptable.”
It was less than a month after prosecutors foiled a right-wing plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan and put her on trial for treason, but rally-goers were more focused on the risk of renewed protests from the left in response. to a Trump victory. “Lock her up!” the Grand Rapids crowd chanted early in the evening, at a mention of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s name.
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06:56
The crowd was small at first. But as the night wore on, the number grew and so did the faith in miracles. In the early hours of November 9, 2016, Donald Trump and his family stepped into a hotel ballroom in downtown Manhattan to celebrate one of the greatest political upheavals of all time.
“Now is the time for the United States to heal the wounds of the division, we have to unite,” said the new president-elect. “To all Republicans, Democrats and independents in this nation, I say that it is time for us to come together as a united people.”
The speech is now even more surprising because, in the opinion of countless critics, Trump spent the next four years doing precisely the opposite. His rule-breaking presidency deepened divisions, spilled oil on flames, tested institutions to the breaking point, and turned the truth itself into a partisan issue.
And on Tuesday, millions of Americans will deliver their verdict in a referendum on Trump’s first term, after a fierce election campaign that has left the nation with even deeper wounds than those exposed four years ago.
Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has lagged the president in all major national opinion polls since he became the Democratic nominee in April. Biden has a greater advantage over Trump, domestically and in several crucial battlefield states, than the ill-fated Hillary Clinton at the same stage in 2016.
However, the staggering repudiation of the political class that year has left Democrats haunted. There is little sign of complacency in the Biden camp amid the deep uncertainties of an election campaign waged in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, and fears that the incumbent will seek to declare victory prematurely and prevent every vote from being counted.
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06:47
06:43
Americans are preparing to an election day unlike any other in American history, overshadowed by a direct threat from Donald Trump of “violence in the streets” if the vote count is not interrupted, stoking fears that democracy itself is at stake when the polls close Tuesday night.
President incendiary tweet, which was quickly labeled by Twitter as potentially misleading, was fired amid a feverish atmosphere on the final night of his campaign, with reports of crowds of his supporters driving through the streets in flag-waving caravans attempting to intimidate opponents, while have business districts in major cities bricked up the windows.[…]
The president’s dark warnings marked the end of a campaign that was in many ways unprecedented.
It is the first election in which the incumbent president has said that he would attempt to stop the counting of votes if anticipated election night results show he is ahead, and he has openly encouraged acts of intimidation by his supporters.
He also set an early voting record. More than 94 million Americans had already cast their votes on Monday, amid a pandemic. It was equivalent to 70% of the 2016 turnout even before election day dawned.
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