The coupe de grace to the presidency of Donald Trump came on Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020, around 11:30 a.m. Eastern when the news arrived that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was projected to win Pennsylvania.
The streets here on a sunny morning in Harlem filled with the sound of horns and cheering. Strangers high-fived and hooted. A jazz duo played.
Biden will become the 46th president. Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, will become the first woman (as well as the first Black person and the first person of Indian descent) elected to that office.
By the time Pennsylvania put Biden over the top with 279 electoral votes, the reckoning that the election held for Trump had been underway for several days, as the counting of votes proceeded in a handful of battleground states.
In an irony of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic, two-thirds of votes cast in this election arrived by mail. Democrats disproportionately voted by mail.
Trump could have urged his supporters to vote by mail as well, but in an act of self-sabotage, the president went out of his way to denigrate absentee voting. The CNN anchor Jake Tapper noted that politicians running for reelection typically try to make voting easier for their voters to turn out.
By midweek, the weakening of Trump’s hold on power had begun to embolden other actors in the democracy. Facebook moved with speed to take down a group that protested under the hashtag #stopthesteal. Twitter masked as many as one-third of Trump’s tweets for spreading misinformation.
Fox News, Trump’s go-to network, showed what the Guardian newspaper called “an unaccustomed display of objectivity” when it declared, over protests from the White House, Biden the winner in Arizona. Editors at The New York Post, another Trump ally, reportedly told staff to toughen their coverage of him.
For his part, Biden spoke to reporters for roughly two minutes on Thursday. “Stay calm. The process is working. The count is being completed. And we’ll know very soon,” said the former vice president.
He didn’t need to say more. The voices that mattered belong to voters. They’ve spoken.