On November 3, former Vice President Joe Biden was elected the 46 President of the United States. Biden won the popular vote securing 51.1% of the popular vote (79,693,395 votes) to President Donald Trump’s 47.2% of the popular vote (73,708,217). President Elect Biden also won the electoral college, securing 306 to 232 electoral votes. Trump won the electoral college vote by the exact count over Hillary Clinton and declared he had won by a landslide even though Clinton had won the popular vote by over 3 million votes.
On Nov. 19, 2020, during a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, with the smell of sweat blackened by his cheap hair dye running down his face, an unhinged former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani had this to say:
“I know crimes, I can smell them. You don’t have to smell this one, I can prove it to you, 18 different ways. I can prove to you that he won, Pennsylvania, by 300,000 votes. I can prove to you that he won Michigan, probably 50,000 votes. …
It’s not a singular voter fraud in one state. This pattern repeats itself in a number of states, almost exactly the same pattern, which any experienced investigator prosecutor, which suggests that there was a plan — from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities, and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly if they focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption.”
“And I’ve often said, I guess sarcastically but it’s true. … The only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn’t cheated in this election. Because for the last 60 years, they’ve cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit.”
During the November 19 press conference, Giuliani promised major suits in Georgia and Arizona and said the legal team is looking at New Mexico as well. Giuliani also promised “hundreds” of affidavits but said he could not show them to reporters. Notwithstanding the new lawsuits announced, Republicans announced that they were dropping federal election lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Since the November 3 election, Trump on a daily basis loudly dismisses the results the election to deny President Elect Joe Biden’s legitimacy. The problem is that Trump’s followers continue to drink the propaganda Kool Aide and want to disenfranchise all who voted by absentee. Trump himself is attempting to steal the election from President Elect Joe Biden with his daily false fraud claims and frivolous lawsuits in all the battleground states Trump is acting like a wounded animal with his refusal to engage in a normal presidential transition and ordering lawsuits filed in the battleground states.
REPUBLICAN PARTY SEEKS TO DISCREDIT ELECTION OF PRESIDENT ELECT BIDEN
Trump’s Republican party is supporting his efforts to discredit the election with the likes of Republican Senators Mitch Mc Connell, Lindsay Graham and Rudy Giuliani supporting his legal challenges. McConnell, the Senate majority leader said that “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” while severely criticizing Democrats for expecting Trump to “accept preliminary election results”. Trump may have the right to legally challenge election results, but he does not have the right to press on in a court of law without absolutely no proof and just lying that the election was rigged.
Trump still has a strangle hold on the Republican party and it will play into his thirst for power after he leaves office. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52% of Republicans believe Trump “rightfully won” the U.S. election and that the election was stolen from him by widespread voter fraud. The poll found that just 26 percent of Republicans said they thought Biden’s win was “legitimate.”
A link to the poll is here:
The opinion poll taken November 13-17 shows that Trump’s open defiance of Biden’s victory in both the popular vote and Electoral College appears to be affecting the public’s confidence in American democracy, especially among Republicans. Altogether, 73% of those polled agreed that Biden won the election while 5% thought Trump won.
When asked specifically whether Biden had “rightfully won,” Republicans showed they were suspicious about how Biden’s victory was obtained. 52% of Republicans said that Trump “rightfully won,” while only 29% said that Biden had rightfully won.
What is alarming is that when Republicans were asked they did not feel that Biden “rightfully won” they said that state vote counters had tipped the result toward Biden. 68% of Republicans said they were concerned that the election was “rigged,” while only 16% of Democrats and one-third of independents were similarly worried.
Altogether, 55% of adults polled said they believed the November 3 presidential election was “legitimate and accurate. That percentage is down 7 points from a similar poll that ran shortly after the 2016 election. The 28% who said they thought the election was “the result of illegal voting or election rigging” is up 12 points from four years ago.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that more Americans appear to be more suspicious about the U.S. election process than they were four years ago. The poll showed Republicans were much more likely to be suspicious of Trump’s loss this year than Democrats were when Hillary Clinton lost four years ago. In 2016, 52% of Democrats said Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump was “legitimate and accurate,” even as reports emerged of Russian attempts to influence the outcome. This year, only 26% of Republicans said they thought Trump’s loss was similarly legitimate.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,346 respondents, including 598 Democrats and 496 Republicans, and has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 5 percentage points.
NOT THE LAST OF THE FASCIST
Trump is already making it known that he wants to run again in 2024 and telling his supporters he wants to keep his options open. As he has done for the last 4 years, he promotes hostility and mistrust amongst his supporters denouncing as “rigged” one of the most secured elections in American history. Lawsuits that are being filed by Trump to challenge the elections in individual state are being dismissed within days of being filed for lack of any proof.
Whether or not Trump actually runs in 2024 is not what is dangerous. It is his supporters that are the most dangerous and what damage he does over the next 4 years to undermine President Joe Biden.
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has put it this way:
“[Imagine]a counter-government, administered by tweets, propped up by Fox News or whatever alternative outlet Trump might construct for himself — a kind of Trumpian government-in-exile … telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency … Trump would be trying to establish a center of power distinct from and antagonistic to the legitimately elected national government — not formally a separate government like the Confederacy but a virtual one, operating not just out in the country but inside the government, above all in Congress. “Two things could stop Trump: either his legal troubles become so severe that he can’t continue, or the Republican Party decides he’s hurting more than helping. … I would not bet on either one of these coming to pass.”
CONCLUSION
The swearing in of President Elect Joe Biden as the 46 President of the United States can not come soon enough. Until then, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is the smell and look of a dying and rotting Trump Presidency that hopefully will not come back from the dead in 2024. One thing is for certain, the control of the United States Senate is still at stake with the two Georgia US Senate seats to be decided in a January runoff. Democrats need to take control of the Senate and bury the obstruction tactics that is the Republican party and embodied in Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnel.