As the results of the US election harden into historical fact, the system that is about to nudge Donald Trump into his chaotic post-presidency remains as puzzling as ever. Consider, for instance, the disparity between the popular vote and electoral college: with more than 5 million extra individual votes, Biden has earned 306 electoral votes, the same number Trump got while losing the 2016 popular vote by almost 3 million. Furthermore, despite losing the presidency, Republicans have gained seats in the lower house and may retain control of the Senate. It is also worth noting that Trump’s vote count grew considerably from 2016 and that his support within the GOP – a party that has not won the popular vote since 2004 – was comparable to that of any previous Republican nominee. If, as many expect, he leaves office vowing to run again in 2024, Trump could stifle rival candidacies for most of the next four years.
Despite a year of upheaval, the data shows that few American voters changed their minds. Although Trump was impeached and Covid-19 claimed more than 230,000 lives, even though there were dizzy economic fluctuations, mass protests, wildfires, a plot to kidnap a state governor, and incendiary allegations about Hunter Biden’s laptop – most Americans voted along party lines. More than 90 percent of Trump’s 2016 voters backed Mitt Romney four years earlier, at the moment it seems a near certainty that more than 90 percent of Trump’s 2016 voters went for him again this year. If anything, Trump’s victories in Texas and Florida showed increased support among the base and made a mockery of pollsters’ cautious predictions of a Biden landslide. If there is a clear message from this election it is that the Democrats won from increased turnout rather than persuading Trump voters to switch sides.
Beyond vote tallies, and setting aside the president’s well documented personal flaws, with sufficient hindsight the Trump years may eventually seem less awful than they have appeared in the last year of his acrimonious presidency. In a long critique of the customary outrages attributed to Trump, the journalist Glenn Greenwald scoffs at the idea that his administration was some “radical aberration, some dramatic break from U.S. tradition.” To be taken seriously, says Greenwald, such assessments must set Trump’s record alongside the actions of his two predecessors, men who expanded “claims of unlimited executive power far beyond ‘merely’ detaining U.S. citizens with no legal constraints to spying on them and even targeting them for assassination without a whiff of due process.” Similarly, anyone who claims to be appalled by Trump’s xenophobia and intolerance must account for the Obama administration’s huge surge of deportations, its caged migrants, and its zealous prosecution of “more whistleblowers and sources under the 1917 Espionage Act … than all prior presidents combined.”
A less forgiving view, from the New Yorker’s David Remnick, recalls Trump’s “war on democratic institutions … [his] politics of conspicuous cruelty, bigotry, and division” and his transformation of the “Presidency into a reality show of lurid accusation and preening self-regard.” Fittingly, Trump’s absurd confidence proved his downfall when, faced with the coronavirus pandemic, his “disdain for scientific and medical expertise, his refusal to endorse even the most rudimentary preventive measures against the spread of the virus, was, according to medical experts, responsible for the needless deaths of tens of thousands.” That 70 million Americans were prepared to give such a man a second term in office is a remarkable indication of how deep America’s political rifts have become, and how likely they are to persist.
What seems beyond dispute is the change in presidential tone. If nothing else, Biden’s long political experience has enabled him to ignore Trump’s post-election petulance with appropriate gravitas. When Trump eventually bows to the inevitable, he is likely to find that no amount of special pleading, presidential pardons, memoirs, media acquisitions or prospective future triumphs will soothe the sting of this loss. Biden, by contrast, having endured several personal tragedies and political disappointments looks set to begin his presidency fully engaged, despite Trump’s unwillingness to proceed with an orderly transition. Given the scale of crises that await him, the president-elect’s maturity and seriousness could not be more welcome, or necessary.
