"So obsessed has Trump been that he has not been doing the job he is fighting so hard to retain."
In the tortuous days following the Nov. 3 US presidential elections, the world breathed a sigh of relief when it became apparent that former Vice President Joe Biden had defeated the incumbent president, Donald Trump, who over almost four years made a mockery of the American system of government.
The relief may have been premature, though. Soon, it became clear that the loser-in-chief at the White House and his minions refused to accept Biden as the president-elect by casting doubt on the integrity of the electoral process, the very heart of American democracy, without providing a shred of credible evidence.
Time and again, Trump and his lawyers would raise his unfounded allegations of widespread fraud, a lie that his millions of followers would parrot, magnifying it in a social media echo chamber.
When his crack legal team led by disgraced former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani filed and lost more than 50 lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results in various states, Trump went to the US Supreme Court, where he had appointed three of the nine sitting justices. Here, he lost too.
Then he sought to subvert the vote in swing states in which he lost, pressuring Republican state legislators to throw out the election results in their states and appoint electors who would cast votes for Trump in the Electoral College. Again Trump lost and the Electoral College certified that Joe Biden would be the next president.
Grasping at straws, Trump is now banking on Republican lawmakers loyal to him to challenge that certification in Congress next month, a bid that will also surely fail.
So obsessed has Trump been that he has not been doing the job he is fighting so hard to retain.
In the dangerous transition period until Biden takes office on Jan.20, the US surpassed 17 million coronavirus cases as daily infections averaged more than 200,000 a day and deaths averaged more than 3,000 a day. More than two Americans die every minute due to COVID-19 as Trump plots ways to overturn the election that he has clearly lost, and to retain a job he really isn’t doing.
Political pundits who have sought to put a positive spin on this sequence of events say that in the end, the system worked and the guard rails kept Trump from stealing the election.
A more realistic view is that this has been an American failure since Trump’s ascent to power in 2016, even though he lost the popular vote by more than 3 million votes to his Democratic challenger. The failure of the system became apparent, too, when Republicans loyal to him turned a blind eye to his offenses that led to his impeachment in 2019. The system is failing still, as Trump uses his unchecked power of pardon to let criminals who worked for him go scot-free.
Donald Trump was ethically, morally and intellectually unqualified for the presidency but enough Americans voted for him anyway. That is a failure in our book.