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When the result was finally announced, and the end of his presidency confirmed, Donald Trump played on a cool fall Saturday afternoon at his private golf club in Virginia.
The president was in the middle of a four-day mission to spread unsubstantiated misinformation about electoral integrity in an attempt to subvert American democracy.
“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY FAR!” he tweeted, falsely, hours before hitting the street.
Of the many false claims Trump has made in the last four years, lying about the size of his inauguration crowd, lying about the path of a life-threatening hurricane, lying about the lethality of the coronavirus, the lies about this election are the most. important. farce and grotesque.
And they have not worked.
A growing chorus of world leaders, some members of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of Americans have already begun to move forward. Trump cast a lone figure when he returned to the White House after playing golf, his caravan was found on the street with hundreds of protesters who simultaneously gave him the middle finger.
At the time of writing this report, the election has not yet been granted; maybe it never will. Several spurious legal challenges are also pending. But on Saturday night, the celebrations in American cities continued into the evening.
That night, President-elect Joe Biden took the stage in Wilmington, Delaware, and declared the beginning of a new political era. “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end, here and now,” he told a crowd gathered in his cars, honking his horn with tears in his eyes. “Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our best angels and our darkest impulses. And what the presidents say in this battle is important. It is time for our best angels to prevail. “
Miles away, I found myself leading a different Joe Biden celebration parade in the South Florida city of Palm Beach. This is one of the most economically divided urban areas in the state, with diverse and low-income neighborhoods to the west and fabulous wealth to the east. Perhaps nothing is more ostentatious than Trump’s own private membership club in Mar-a-Lago, his self-styled “Winter White House.”
The convoy of cars, of about 50 vehicles, crossed into the affluent suburbs and skirted high, palm-lined roads less than a mile from Trump’s club.
“We did it! We did it!” Shouted Wendy Bostic, 37, a preschool teacher and one of thousands of black organizers who helped Biden secure this victory. Bostic lost his job for six months during the pandemic and believes that Biden offers a path to help rebuild his community. “It’s over. This darkness. It’s over.”
She gestured to her two-year-old twin daughters, Nyla and Kyla, and said that the months of community organizing had been to secure their future. The United States will see its first wife, first black, first Asian-American vice president, Kamala Harris, something that meant everything to Bostic. “It is almost more important than Biden himself,” he said.
Although Biden lost Florida, he garnered the most votes of any presidential candidate in American history, more than 74.5 million. Exit polls suggest that his coalition included nearly 90% of black voters, two-thirds of Hispanic and Asian voters, more than 60% of youth, and more than half of women. He appears to have won the popular vote by at least 4 million.
In more advanced democracies, that would be an important mandate to govern. But the US Senate is still up for grabs with two runoff elections in the state of Georgia to decide who controls the chamber, a critical branch of government that could make or break the Biden administration’s legislative agenda.
Still, the power of the presidency will allow Joe Biden to reverse some of the most extreme actions of the previous administration. It will take a more proactive approach to mitigating the effects of the pandemic. It will rejoin the Paris climate agreement. It will end with the construction of Trump’s wall. All probably within the first days of taking office.
But policy changes and fast-paced rhetoric will only get you so far. And the failures to protect the most vulnerable in American society began long before Donald Trump.
It has been four years of polarization that have left the United States as a more damaged and fractured society. While the majority of the country voted for Biden, more than 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. The president has created a new political paradigm, partly rooted in the country’s oldest sins, but also fueled by a climate of conspiracy theories, misinformation and a cult of personality.
Reporting on these elections has often felt like reporting on two different realities.
I spent election night divided between these two worlds. More precisely, I spent it looking inside a packed party in Palm Beach, through the security of a glass door. Inside, 500 Republican revelers, without masks or social distancing, danced to the Village People and celebrated a Trump victory, even as it became increasingly clear that the winner would not be decided that night. Behind those doors it was as if the pandemic did not exist. And Donald Trump would remain president for eternity.
But when the reality of a multi-day wait began to be realized by the assembled crowd, some of whom had spent $ 500 to attend, the anger was palpable.
“If Biden comes in, we’re totally crouched down,” said a woman, resisting the urge to curse as he left. “We are crouched down to the maximum because he is going to close everything. You’re listening to stupid scientists. They don’t understand everything. “
I have often found myself at the center of Trump’s darkest impulses over the past four years, reporting from the ground on the real-life consequences of his brutal political decisions, dangerous rhetoric, and utter incompetence.
In 2018, I sat in federal court in McAllen, Texas, and saw a man named Ramón Villata, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, plead with an American judge to meet with his two-year-old son. They had been shattered by the administration’s child separation policy, perhaps the most damning indictment of the moral vacuum created by his presidency.
In 2017, I was sent to Charlottesville, Virginia, the day after the murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer. I saw his friends and family mourn after his death at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist, after neo-Nazi thugs with torches shouted “The Jews will not replace us” during a violent demonstration in his hometown. Trump described “very good people on both sides” in the immediate aftermath of a racist riot, an abhorrent nod to white supremacists.
Later that year, I reported from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria claimed the lives of 3,057 Americans. As Trump threw paper towels at a crowd in San Juan, the island’s capital, and professed that his administration had done a “fantastic job” in recovery, I sat with a family in a remote rural town in the center of the city. Island that had lost almost everything, forced to drink stream water and live by candlelight. They had received no federal aid, and the administration would continue to fail the island for months to come.
And this year, in some of the poorest communities of color in the southern United States, I have witnessed the tragedy of death, illness and economic hardship imposed by the pandemic on the most vulnerable in society. All in the midst of antagonism against public health, objective science and a culture war, instigated by the most powerful man on earth, for the simple fact of wearing a mask.
Rhetoric, politics, and competition are easy to rectify. But uniting the nation, restoring faith in institutions, facts and truth, and now the democratic process itself, will be the challenge of Joe Biden’s life.
He took a tentative first step toward that Saturday night.
“To progress we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. They are not our enemies, ”he said. “They are americans”.
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