Tag: Election2020

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News

Trump incites violence against America

The seal of the U.S. Senate includes a scroll inscribed with “E Pluribus Unum” emblazoned on the wall above the desk at the center of the chamber. 

The inscription, which translates to “Out of many, one,” formed one of the most striking images to emerge from Wednesday’s assault on the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-fueled mob. In it, a member of the mob can be seen seated at the desk, the Latin on the wall behind him. 

Throughout four years that will finally end on January 20, Trump has embodied a sentiment of his own design; in his America, one matters more than many. The president’s baseless claims of election fraud are the latest manifestation of that belief. 

American democracy counts on coordination. The storming of the Capitol highlights the vulnerability of our federal system to those who aim to get their way by exploiting its gaps.

As the rioters forced lawmakers to suspend the counting of electoral votes that marks a mandate of our constitutional democracy, the federal and state lines that delineate it showed amid a scramble to summon reinforcements for police who guard the building.

Trump refused to call on the rioters to retreat. The District of Columbia endures without sovereignty of its own and a governor who can summon help. If fell to the city’s mayor and the governor of Virginia to call in the national guard.

The lack of federal leadership paralleled Trump’s abdication during the pandemic, throughout which he has forced the states to fend for themselves. The president has left the states to procure their own protective equipment, to develop their own tests and tracing, to carry out (or not) their own campaigns to promote wearing of masks and other non-pharmaceutical measures, and, most recently, to vaccinate people. 

By refusing to call on Americans to cover their faces (not to mention refusing to wear a mask himself), Trump ensured that many more Americans would be sickened by COVID-19 and die. Universal use of masks in the U.S. might have saved as many as 130,000 lives, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

The pandemic and the protests converged on Wednesday. As the rioters overran the Capitol, news emerged that a luxury nursing home in Florida offered scarce doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to its donors and board members. Even as elderly people at risk from the virus camp out across the state in the hope of receiving a vaccine. 

It’s not as if we didn’t see it coming. Trump defended violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville when he remarked there “were very fine people, on both sides.” He tried to coerce the leader of Ukraine to dig for dirt on Trump’s opponent. On Saturday, Trump asked the top election official in Georgia to find votes that would swing the state to Trump and overturn the outcome of the election.

With his attack on our democracy, Trump has pushed federalism to the breaking point. The Capitol houses not only a coequal branch of government but the first among equals according to the Constitution.

“Show me what democracy looks like,” chant protestors who call on America to right its racial and other injustices. The rioters who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday showed what an assault on democracy looks like when fueled by malevolence and a motive to weaken the nation.

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Politics U.S.

The GOP ditches democracy

Subsumed by the news since the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3 is a study released in the closing weeks of the campaign that finds the Republican party has withdrawn from upholding democratic norms.

The finding came from the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, which since 1970 has studied shifts in political parties around the world. In the GOP’s illiberalism, the study finds, the party resembles the authoritarian party of Hungary’s Viktor Orban that has made Hungary country the only non-democracy in the European Union.

The Republican Party has displayed its anti-democratic drive without hesitation over the two weeks since the election. The party’s congressional delegation, with a handful of exceptions, has joined President Trump in refusing to acknowledge the results. Ditto for many Republican governors. Republican support for Trump’s claims are “delegitimizing democracy,” former President Barack Obama told CBS News.

Unearthing Trump’s motivation comes down to, as Steve Coll noted in the New Yorker, “what’s in it for him.” Trump may see a second term as the best hope for shielding himself from both prosecution and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. “It’s the office of the presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,” Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

For their part, Republicans seem to be acting out of fear for their own for survival (thanks to Trump’s sway with their base) and a determination to hold power. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, may hope that by insisting that Trump has every right to contest the results (notwithstanding any evidence of irregularity in the voting), he’ll encourage Republicans in Georgia to turn out for two Senate run-off elections that will decide whether McConnell retains his job.

For years now, Republicans have relied on partisan gerrymandering, the structural advantage the Senate confers on rural states, and other anti-Democratic devices to achieve what they’ve been unable to at the ballot box. A majority of Americans, for example, support abortion rights. So Republicans focus on filling federal courts with judges who oppose such rights.

If nothing else, the GOP’s refusal to accept the result of the election (while embracing results of elections won by its members) shows that democracy is as difficult as ever. Seventy-two million Americans voted for Donald Trump.

Misinformation matters. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say that social media sites likely censor political viewpoints. “It’ll take more than one election to reverse those trends,” Obama told the BBC, referring to what he termed “truth decay.”

Finding ways to show Americans what we have in common would help, too. In a memo last week, four leading progressive groups analyzed what went wrong for congressional Democrats, who nearly lost their majority in the House of Representatives. The underperformance touched off a debate between the party’s left and members who blamed the left for the results.

In their memo, the progressive groups call for an economic message that connects with working people of all races.  “Too often Democrats keep issues of economic justice and racial justice in separate siloes,” they wrote. “Data has shown that an explicit multiracial, populist message mobilizes and persuades voters. We need a Democratic Party dedicated to economic and racial justice and that names the Republican Party’s racism as a class weapon.”

Trump was a strongman without a strategy. Someday our democracy may confront one who has their act together. Now would be time to get ready.

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News

Biden beats Trump

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.

Categories
U.S.

Note about the presidential election that I wrote on my phone before falling asleep on Nov. 4

Awoke around 2:15 a.m. Eastern to hear Trump declare that he was ahead and had won the election… he has not won anything… the counting of votes continues in states that will decide the outcome… Trump had been expected to declare victory prematurely… which is what he’s done…

Categories
Politics

The candidates deliver their closing arguments

The closing minutes of the second and final presidential debate seemed to pack the entirety of the campaign into two minutes.

The setup came in a question from moderator Kristen Welker, who asked both President Trump and his rival Joe Biden what they would say in their inaugural address to Americans who did not vote for them.

Trump, who went first, did not answer the question. Instead he predicted that if the former vice president were elected, “you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen, your 401(k)s will go to hell, and it will be a very sad day for this country.”

When his turn came, Biden said he’d choose “science over fiction,” “hope over fear,” “deal with systemic racism,” ensure that “everyone has an even chance,” and create “millions” of new jobs in clean energy. The former vice president said he would represent all Americans “whether you voted for me or against me.”

The moment marked the last chance for each candidate to deliver a closing message to a national audience; the campaign equivalent of the final minutes of a soccer match when the sides scramble furiously to score.

Trump’s argument may be one of necessity: His concealing, dismissing, mismanaging and ultimately losing control of the pandemic has left him pointing to the stock market, which in the closing days of the campaign hovers at pre-pandemic levels, as a proxy for his performance.

That someone who played a successful businessperson on TV now clings to a financial market as a political life preserver brings its own irony. To the extent stocks have held their ground, they’ve done so thanks in part to a pandemic-induced lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. In another twist, the central bank’s chairman was, at least until COVID-19 arrived, a regular Trump target.

Though stocks might hold sway with some of the roughly one-third of Americans who have a 401(k) plan, there aren’t enough of them to reelect a president. Even in normal times, share prices are hardly a proxy for prosperity. And the times are anything but normal. More Americans lost their jobs in two months last spring than during the Great Depression and the recession of 2008 combined.

For his part, Biden, if you untangle the syntax, sought to unite. The economy matters there, too. The fault lines laid bare by the pandemic include widening inequality, which the pandemic threatens to accelerate without a Biden administration and its allies in Congress finding a way to rebuild a safety net that has frayed beyond repair.

In a New York Times/Siena College poll earlier this month, 91% of likely Democratic voters said they support a new $2 trillion stimulus package to extend unemployment insurance, send stimulus checks to most Americans, and provide financial support to state and local governments.

Predictably by now, the survey divided sharply on partisan lines. With one exception: The proposed stimulus also commanded support from a majority (56%) of likely Republican voters.

Whether measured in lives ended or upended, the pandemic’s toll grows by the day. The coming together that Biden is offering may be taking shape already.