Last week, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers indicated that the president has no plans to leave the White House.
“We are advancing here in the White House on the assumption that there will be a second term for Trump,” said Peter Navarro, the White House trade advisor, in an interview with Fox Business. It came days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the same thing.
Although President Trump is refusing to compromise, the 2020 presidential election is over. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have clearly won a close election, reclaiming the states Hillary Clinton lost four years earlier. Democrats appear to have been able to win enough independent support in a high turnout election – and this was during a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
A strange election season
The 2020 election season has been tumultuous in the United States. There were so many subplots that it was sometimes difficult to follow every turn. From the death of Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg just six weeks before the election to the New York Times obtaining the president’s tax returns that turned out to be barely anything to pay, to a right-wing militia plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, it was an election season bizarre, to say the least.
“Then the president ends up at Walter Reed Hospital with the same disease he described as the hoax,” said Trevor Potter, a former commissioner and chair of the United States Federal Election Board.
“The truth is, if you put this together in a description of a novel, the publisher would send it to you and say it’s unbelievable – that you can have some, but not all of them in your book.”
In line behind Biden
Fault lines He began election coverage this year in South Carolina during the intense Democratic primary at the end of February.
At the time, Joe Biden was far behind in the polls, but he used a strategy that relied on palmetto black voters to push him to the front of the race. Our staff was present at Biden’s rally the day he garnered support from a powerful party broker, Congressman Jim Kleburn, who breathed new life into his campaign.
“I didn’t plan to run again. What made me realize that something had to happen was when I saw these people coming out of the fields in Charlottesville carrying torches,” Biden told a small crowd at a historic auditorium in Georgetown, South Carolina.
When asked by the press [Trump] “What do you think, Mr. President? There are very good people on both sides,” he said. No president has ever performed this moral equivalence. That’s when I realized it was much deeper than that. “
The Democratic establishment quickly sided behind Biden after he easily won the state and propelled him to the nomination with a dominant performance on Super Tuesday.
‘Trumpism will not go away with Donald Trump’
The general election showed us that President Trump remains hugely popular with broad sections 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 appear to be fading anytime soon.
A supporter of Donald Trump wears a Donald Trump mask on the Rapahannock River in Urbanna, Virginia on September 26. [Josh Rushing/Al Jazeera]“Trumpism will not disappear with Donald Trump, Trump will not disappear, and it will return in a new form within a few years,” said Thomas Frank, writing about American politics and culture.
“If he comes back with a smarter person at the head of the movement, someone who doesn’t unduly insult people or flaunt how they mistreat women, it might be very difficult to defeat Trumpism.”
For now, the president appears intent on staying where he is in the White House and promoting the false narrative that the election was stolen from him. He is raising money from his crowd of supporters who will waddle the coffers of Super PAC “Save America” and the Republican Party.
The Republican Party Keys
The Republican Party has handed over the party’s keys to Trump. At the convention this year, for the first time since the party was founded in the 1850s, the party decided not to adopt a political program, and instead support what it called Trump’s agenda for America first.
“It was truly unprecedented because party politics is one of the basic institutions of American democracy,” explains Jennifer Nicole Victor, a professor of political science at George Mason University.
“It signals the weakness of the Republican Party, that he’s going to give up that quadruple strength to voice a platform, but it also talks about the way President Trump has captured the Republican Party in a wonderful way.”
“We need a psychological and political break.”
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are pressing ahead with their efforts to build a transition team to prepare for a series of challenges next year when they take office.
A supporter of Joe Biden expresses herself outside an early polling site in Fairfax, Virginia on September 24 [Josh Rushing/Al Jazeera]There are still two Senate races in Georgia heading into the 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 Coronavirus spreads across the country, the White House will face a set of challenges left by the Trump administration, which the new administration will have to address.
Reverend William Barber, political and spiritual activist in the Poor’s Campaign, said, “America just got this weird thing. We’re always in some kind of crisis, we’re always in a fight for this democracy.”
“But, at this moment, we need a psychological break. We have some things to do after counting all the votes during election season, but we need a psycho-political break from what we see now.”
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