Us election 2020

Donald Trump’s increasingly outrageous attempts to contest the results of the US presidential election were given their absurd symbol early on with what one commentator called The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco.  A week ago, with the decisive votes being counted in the last, critical states in the election, with Trump making a forlorn attempt to persuade Americans he had been cheated out of victory, someone on the campaign blundered. They were supposed to book the Four Seasons in Philadelphia for a press conference by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Instead, they booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a gardening company in an industrial area of north-east Philly, somewhere out

Three days after statisticians called the 2020 US presidential election for Joe Biden, the loser of that contest continues to sulk in the White House like a spoiled eight-year-old kid and is brooding about the result. Trump’s campaign may still be holding meetings and convincing themselves that the race isn’t over – Trump’s political advisers are reportedly discussing a series of television ads and rallies to sow doubt about Biden’s victory – but back on planet earth, the math is the math: whether or not you liked the result, Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. Even some of Trump’s own family members, including his wife, Melania,

The Democratic Party was anticipating a blue wave this fall, a victory of such magnitude that Republicans would be spending the next two years fighting amongst themselves rather than controlling the purse strings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was so confident of this blue wave scenario that she sent a memo to her Democratic colleagues outlining a list of bold policy proposals that unified Democratic government in Washington could achieve in the first several months. At the top of that list: a new coronavirus relief package and defending – and building on – the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi, however, got ahead of her skis.

If the US election was a television drama, the drum-roll end credits of the penultimate episode played this week and we are now waiting for the denouement. Only, there was never supposed to be a cliffhanger. An exhausted nation should have chosen boredom. Biden was meant to have been the clear victor and the political clock reset to a pre-2016 normality. But, in a plot twist that is by now so familiar we have no excuse for not anticipating it, opinion polls and commentators alike called it wrong. It’s not just in the US. All around the world, elections have become more difficult to predict. Traditional party loyalties have been

President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden were supposed to debate in front of the American public last night. The debate, however, was called off after Trump refused to do it via video link. So instead, Americans were treated to two different town-halls on two different U.S. television networks. While Trump was talking about conspiracy theories on NBC, Biden was talking policy on ABC. The former was part-absurd, part-therapy session. The latter was boring and frankly what you would think a typical presidential town-hall would look like. Trump won’t admit it, but he’s in trouble. As the coronavirus count gets higher, his poll numbers are getting lower and