It’s all over, bar the litigation. Without some mind-blowing legal reversal in the coming days, Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump must be extracted from the White House in the coming weeks, though if he is unwilling to leave nobody is quite sure how he’ll be removed.
Trump believes the election has been stolen from him — so do many of the 70 million Americans who voted for him. Trust is a vanishingly rare commodity in American democracy.
But Trump started crying foul weeks, even months ago. ‘This is a fraud on the American public,’ he declared in the early hours of Wednesday. ‘We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.’ But if Trump knew that the ‘do nothing Democrats’, as he calls them, were going to try to cheat at the polls, he should have done more to ensure the mail-in process would be more transparent. As it is, he sounds desperate and deluded.
Biden gave one of his better speeches on Saturday night, after the media networks declared that he had passed the magic 270 number of Electoral College votes to achieve victory. He looked more energetic than he did in the run up to the election. His boosters will claim, now that a result has been declared, that victory was actually more convincing than the initial results suggested, especially if Biden ends up carrying the state of Georgia. Don’t believe them. This year’s presidential election was extraordinarily close.
The truth is that the Democrats and the pundit class had written off Trump, once again. And Trump proved them wrong, once again.
Can we just agree never to pay any attention to polls from now on? Or whizzy mathematical election models? The big pollsters all assured us that they had learned the lesson of 2016.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in