In 65 days from today, the monstrous narcissist that is Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States, a position he never should have ascended to in the first place, and despite the 73 million wrong-headed, Mussolini-lovin’, cult-like votes he managed to secure earlier this month from the American electorate, Donald Trump remains a blight on the social and political landscape of the U.S., and everywhere across the globe.
No one, ten years from now, will ever admit to having voted for this sociopathic, hate-filled traitor — any support for him will have long been repudiated by the vast majority of Republicans, and the U.S. electorate.
In the meantime, Donald Trump refuses to concede, to conduct himself as a responsible citizen, and to co-operate with an orderly transition of power — thereby causing the United States, and all of us, to find ourselves in a precarious state of a lack of security to fight those who would do us harm. No surprise there, of course — it’s just par for the course for Donald Trump, apt phraseology given Trump’s love for spending time on the golf course.
For months before the election, political analysts and worried members of the public wondered what would happen if Donald Trump refused to concede after losing to Joe Biden. With Trump’s fetish for autocratic power, inability to accept negative consequences, and lack of apparent tether to democratic norms, the prospect of his outright ignoring an election defeat seemed all but certain. No one who’s been watching Trump in horror for the past four years should be surprised by his unhinged obfuscatory tactics.
While it’s true that no modern U.S. presidential candidate has refused to concede, and while American history’s most contentious presidential races have also ended in admissions of defeat, if not an expressed concession outright, and there are no legal consequences should Trump continue to refuse to concede, the transition team President-elect Joseph R. Biden has put in place has already addressed the matter of concession, issuing a statement that reads, in part, “the U.S. government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House, if such becomes necessary.”
John R. Vile, dean of political science at Middle Tennessee State University, who has written about the history of concession speeches, argues that it matters for presidential candidates to concede even if it doesn’t have legal consequences, because words matter.
“Adherence to established electoral norms has helped shore up U.S. democracy even in the midst of its most chaotic and divisive elections,” Vile has written. “When it comes down to it, it’s not the Army or the Navy that keeps the United States together. It’s the notion that we are bound together by certain great principles and that our similarities are more binding than our differences are.”
On Monday, December 14th, the U.S. College of Electors will meet to acknowledge that having won 306 electoral college votes, Joseph R. Biden will become the 46th President of the United States, a fact that will be further amplified by a meeting of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, January 6th, creating the conditions for the Inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be sworn into office, and officially become the President and Vice President of the United States.
In an article in Politico, David A. Bell, a professor of history at Princeton University and author, most recently, of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution argues that whether or not Trump concedes, come January 20, he will be looking for a new job.
“Trump is undoubtedly tempted to remain as much as possible in the public eye, rage-tweeting against the Biden administration,” Bell writes, “and possibly starting up a new cable TV network. But he also has to worry about criminal investigations, and about defaulting on his considerable debt now that he can no longer use the presidency to drive business to his hotels and resort properties.”
Which is to say, Trump’s post-presidency will hardly be a bed of roses.
VanRamblings would argue that unless, as has been rumoured, tough guy New York Governor Andrew Cuomo becomes the next U.S. Attorney General and orders the prosecutors in the southern district of New York state to cease all investigatory work pertaining to Trump, the 24 credible cases of sexual assault that have been lodged against Trump will move forward through the courts, in all probability leading to a conviction on most, if not all, of the allegations — leaving Donald Trump to experience a penury not dissimilar to that of Harvey Weinstein, and a multiple year prison sentence.
And that’s not all. Trump faces incoming fire from three different directions in his native New York, his odds of escaping unscathed long indeed. New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed motions revealing that her office too is on Trump’s trail, arising from a long-standing civil investigation into whether the Trump Organization improperly inflated its assets to get loans and obtain tax benefits, a practice that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told Congress was routine. The release of Trump’s eight years of unreleased tax records could very well trigger action by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to file criminal charges.
If Trump were to issue himself a pardon, or resign his office in January and have a lame duck Mike Pence as president for 10 days issue a pardon of Trump, such a pardon would preempt federal prosecution, but it would not stand in the way of state-initiated action by James and Vance in New York.
Slate Political Gabest co-hosts David Plotz, Emily Bazelon & John Dickerson weigh in on Trump’s failure to concede, transition planning by the incoming Biden administration, and the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare.
Trump has proved himself a prolific escape artist during his presidency, using delay, subterfuge and political muscle to push back against any number of potentially mortal lies, gaffes and legal threats. But his very success in doing so has inspired many powerful actors in the legal profession to want to hold him, finally, to account after he leaves office.
As VanRamblings writes this, more than 251 million Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19. As is the case in Canada, many American children have lost months of school. Soon, a huge part of America will lose any semblance of Thanksgiving, the most important of American holidays.
Because of the Trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy, 545 children may be lost to their parents forever. America has lost its status as a leading democracy. More people have lost their jobs under Trump than under any president since World War II.
A perpetual state of emergency proved so unhealthy for many Americans, and so unsustainable that a record 78,764,266 Democratic voters made it to the polls, even amidst a pandemic, to reclaim their country and end the tenure of the panic-inducing Trump administration that blocked out the sun and all but eradicated hope in a United States that became near unrecognizable to many citizens of conscience living across our Earth.
But soon, a new day will dawn. Only when Donald Trump has gone will all of us come to see how much we’ve been missing these past four years.
Bill Maher | Farewell to the Douchebags in the Trump Administration
