When Joe Biden won a hard-fought presidential race against incumbent Donald Trump earlier this month, jubilant Americans danced in the streets in cities from coast to coast. Thanksgiving had arrived early, and the “turkey” soon would be gone.
Biden won the contest by 306 electoral votes—the same electoral tally that propelled Trump to the White House in what he then called a “landslide” win, despite losing the popular vote to Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now Trump is coming across as a sore loser as he and his minions seek to overturn the results of this year’s election. The same alleged conservatives who have long decried “frivolous lawsuits” before “activist judges” now hope to hold on to power by lodging frivolous lawsuits before activist judges who could side with Trump and his team.
What had been a presidential bout between two septuagenarian white guys turned into a “thrilla in vanilla” as the battle went on long after Election Day. Trump garnered well over 70 million popular votes, but Biden earned millions more, and even the longtime Republican state of Georgia went blue for Biden in the first presidential victory by a Democrat in Georgia since Bill Clinton carried the Peach State in 1992. After the election, historian Jon Meacham said, “Dignity, decency and democracy were on the ballot, and they barely won.”
Still, Trump has refused to concede the election, and his angry supporters converged on the nation’s capital by the thousands for a weekend rally where they waved Trump banners and howled that the election was a fraud and rigged because their man lost. Trump campaigned by calling his opponent “Sleepy Joe,” but in the end, “Sleepy” dwarfed Trump at the polls and left the GOP president feeling “Grumpy” and “Dopey” after he became “Donald Lame Duck” with a Jan. 20 eviction notice from the White House.
Biden was never the darling of political progressives in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were favorites of the party’s left wing, but Biden did what Sanders and Warren probably could not have done: He beat Donald Trump. Now there is the possibility that Trump might try for another run in 2024, proving that British orator Edmund Burke was right nearly two centuries ago when he said, “Those who have been once intoxicated with power and have derived any kind of emolument from it… can never willingly abandon it.” The once-dignified Grand Old Party has now become the “Trumpublican Party,” a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donald J. Trump and his family that preys together. He and his millions of supporters are not going away, and Trump will no doubt busy himself with political mischief before his days in the White House end.
Now the eyes of the nation are on Georgia as the upcoming Jan. 5 runoff election could decide the balance of the United States Senate. Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are running against incumbent Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in a Georgia election that could decide whether or not a Biden presidency will be mired in political gridlock in the Senate. This runoff is of utmost importance for the political future of this nation, and Democratic voters who celebrated when Trump came up a loser should return to the polls in massive numbers to turn their Senate candidates into winners.
This country today is a divided nation where the stench of fascism, American-style, mixes with the sting of tear gas. The political right wing is giving new meaning to the term “crybaby conservatives,” even though GOP candidates did well in down-ballot races this year, and even though conservatives may hold on to the reins of power in the Senate, as well as in the courts, many churches and much of the media. President Biden will have his hands full with a political right wing that will use its power to thwart every Democratic initiative in Congress.
When Biden moves into the White House, he will see what Joni Mitchell meant when she sang, “There’s danger in this land. You get witch-hunts and war when the church and state hold hands.”
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