US election produces as many losers as winners
Celebrate this brief moment in the sun, because storm clouds are already gathering after Joe Biden’s victory
The election of Joe Biden feels as if a dark cloud has been lifted from above the United States. Even if there are further storms on the horizon, now is a time to celebrate Donald Trump becoming a one-term President (although it hasn’t sunk in for him yet).
The unrestrained joy seen on streets across the US has been echoed around the world because Trump was the ugly American personified. This bloated orange buffoon with his fake hair and fake tan was even more unpopular outside of his own country than he was within it.
But the 2020 election has been far from an total victory for Joe Biden and the Democrats. Biden faces a Herculean task to get on top of the biggest public health crisis in a century, pull the US economy out of recession, and heal a badly divided nation, all while the Republicans do everything they can to make him fail.
It’s time to look at the ledger of winners and losers from this historic election.
Winner: Joe Biden
Joe Biden had twice run for President before, bowing out in the primaries in 1988 and 2008, and had then served two terms as Barack Obama’s Vice President. After contributing to his country’s governance for more than four decades by the time Obama left office, Biden had nothing left to prove and at 77 should be enjoying his retirement. But Biden was drawn back into politics out of a sense of duty to rescue his country from the Trump nightmare. Biden’s pitch was that he had the gravitas, the experience and the decency to lead the US back from oblivion; the opposite of Trump.
His arrival in the primaries was met with audible groans: here was yesterday’s man, a relic of old school centrist politics, seeking to disrupt a primary season that was Bernie Sanders to win. And after his shaky start in the early primaries, Biden certainly looked like a has been. At that stage he must have been the only person who thought he had a chance of winning the nomination, let alone the presidency. But it’s now history that Biden became the comeback kid with his South Carolina win on February 29, stormed Super Tuesday, and ended with more than twice as many delegates as Sanders.
Yet still many doubted that Biden had the charisma or the policy chops to defeat a rampant Trump, and there were fears that he would be unable to unite the Democrats and keep the party’s left on board. That was until COVID-19 began to devastate America, and suddenly it was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Trump threw everything he could at Biden, falsely asserting he was corrupt and senile, attacking his family, but nothing stuck. It turns out Biden’s steady, calm demeanour was exactly what Americans wanted.
Loser: Donald Trump
Donald Trump is now the first one-term President in a quarter of a century and he has no-one to blame but himself. From day one of his presidency, when he threw a tantrum because the size of the crowd at his inauguration was less than Obama’s eight years earlier, Trump has behaved like a spoilt child. His has been the most scandal prone Presidency since Nixon’s and it has divided and polarised America like no-one else before him.
But it is not only his behaviour, appalling as it has been, that will mark Trump down as the worst President in history. He has presided over a corrupt administration, filling key positions with family members and cronies and blatantly using the office of the President to enrich himself. This is the President who will be remembered for locking children up in cages, undermining the global institutions the US helped establish, cosying up to dictators in Russia and North Korea, seeking to dismantle the Affordable Care Act while handing his wealthy friends a whopping tax cut, providing encouragement to violent right wing extremists while ignoring the racial injustices playing out on the streets of major cities, and mocking those who took the pandemic seriously. The list of victims of Trump’s administration is long and deep, and he has made an art form of hurting the weak and vulnerable.
And lest we forget that he narrowly survived being impeached earlier this year.
Almost 75 million Americans have cast their judgement on Trump’s presidency, a blue wave unlike any ever seen before. He is a loser with a capital L. Yet even in defeat, Trump has been appalling, refusing to accept the result and concede he has lost, falsely claiming electoral fraud and various other conspiracies, and undermining democratic tradition. Trump can whine and rant and bleat all he wants, but none of it will change the fact that on 20 January, he will be evicted from the White House. And not a day too soon.
Winner: Democracy
It’s difficult to overstate just how much democracy itself was at risk in this year’s election. Trump has shown disdain for democracy, expressing admiration for strong man leaders from totalitarian countries, and if he had won he would have been even more gung ho in attacking and dismantling democratic institutions in politics, the judiciary and the bureaucracy. But democracy has prevailed; it may be scratched and torn, but it has prevailed, and not even Trump’s pathetic ranting and legal stunts can prevent the will of the people being implemented.
Loser: The American Electoral System
Democracy may have prevailed, but the American electoral system has proved itself to not be fit for purpose. Instead it is a joke. Joe Biden has won the popular vote by almost 5 million, one of the biggest margins in history, but he has had to scramble for every last electoral college vote.
The electoral college may once have been an appropriate way to choose the President, but today it is a gerrymander that favours smaller, more conservative states over larger, more liberal ones. This means the Democrats begin each presidential election with one hand tied behind their backs.
The same goes for the Senate: how can it be that Mississippi, population 2.9 million, gets to elect the same number of Senators as California, with its population of 39 million? The patchwork of different voting systems across the US, each of them determined by the county or state government, is a joke, as is the way that individual states can determine when and how votes are counted. Voter suppression is rampant, with conservative states finding endlessly creative ways to disenfranchise Democrat voters, especially the poor and Blacks.
Voluntary voting is susceptible to single issues that encourage or discourage turnout, and there is too much concentration on turnout in the first place. The electoral system is controlled by big money and so hideously expensive that the only way to win office is to either be a millionaire or sell your soul to business donors.
An independent federal electoral commission like the one we have in Australia is long overdue. As Dan Pfeiffer said on Pod Save America on Saturday, America is a centre left country with a centre right political system that is inherently biased against the Democrats. Somehow the system produced the right result in 2020, but there can be no faith it will do the same in future.
Winner: Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders may have failed again in his second attempt to become the Democrats’ nominee for President, but he is unlikely to be losing too much sleep over it.
Trump will soon be gone, and through the primary process in 2016 and 2020, he has reshaped the Democratic Party (which, incidentally, he doesn’t belong to) both in form and in policy. Sanders successfully dragged the party to the left, forcing the eventual nominee to adopt most of his platform, including the Green New Deal. And he has inspired a new generation of political activists, a growing number of them already now elected representatives, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Well played, Bernie, well played.
Loser: The Republican Party establishment
Donald Trump’s barnstorming of the Republican primaries in 2016 was the beginning of an unending nightmare for the party establishment.
He took on and defeated party luminaries like Jeb Bush, and then effectively took over the GOP itself, purging the establishment and recasting it in his own populist, ultra-right wing nationalist image. Party leaders have had no choice but to fall in line with Trump or face the fury of his base, so for four years they allowed him to dictate terms. The GOP, which was already facing electoral oblivion from demographic change, is now a vehicle for a white nativist movement, and on 3 November they followed Trumpover the cliff. In four years, the GOP has lost the White House, the House of Representatives, and could still lose the Senate.
But while the GOP establishment may have been a big loser from this election, Trumpism itself is a winner, even if Trump also lost. The GOP is no longer the centre right party that has always been the key to its electoral success, but is now the home for right wing loonies, much like Trump himself. The MAGA industrial complex is now unstoppable.
The party’s leaders now face a stark choice: break all ties with Trump and try to navigate a path back to the middle, incurring the enmity of Trump and his supporters; or wed themselves to Trump and become a haven for extremists from the far right. But either way, they can’t sit on the fence.
Winner: Women
Donald Trump was the misogynist-in-chief. This was a man who was caught on tape during the 2016 election boasting about “grabbing pussies”, who has been mired in a string of affairs and sexual harassment scandals, including one with a porn actress, and happily heaps abuse upon women.
The Trump administration had very few women in key positions, and it enacted policies that were outright harmful to women. It was not just a matter of tone: under Trump, the right to abortion was under threat as were other advances made by women over recent decades.
Women were the heart of the opposition to Trump, they voted in their tens of millions to get rid of him, and in the greatest and most delicious irony of all, his downfall will result in the first woman in history being elected Vice-President — and a woman from a mixed race upbringing at that. And Kamala Harris would now have to be odds on to be the President of the United States within eight years.
Loser: Fox News
Throughout the Trump presidency, Fox News has been the regime’s de facto propaganda arm. Fox commands a huge audience and has run an unashamedly pro-Trump editorial slant. Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have been sounding boards for Trump and he has sought advice from them. Qanon conspiracy theories were first given oxygen on Fox and the network has played a major role in the disinformation wars.
Trump himself gets all his news from Fox, so the two became an echo chamber for each other. The more Fox egged him on, the crazier Trump got, and vice-versa. But in the end, not even Fox could get Trump re-elected and the network will not be treated with the same reverence by the Biden White House.
Indeed, if Biden knows what is good for him, he won’t give Fox the time of day. Rupert Murdoch seems to have belatedly realised this, and Fox’s coverage became noticeably less favourable of Trump once election counting began. Fox will no doubt be a thorn in Biden’s side, but it will no longer have the insider status it has enjoyed over the past four years.
However, while Fox may be a diminished force, the right wing media ecosystem that exists on the internet and social media is growing in size and influence. The misinformation viruses being spread by this web of shady outlets, of which Breitbart and Infowars are just two prominent examples, is the greatest threat to US democracy now and it is difficult to see how Biden can rein them in.
Winner: People of Colour
Donald Trump has a long history of racism going back to his campaign to wrongfully convict the ‘Central Park rapists’ in the 1980s, the discriminatory treatment of African American tenants of his properties in New York, his role in the Barack Obama ‘birther’ conspiracy, and his vow to build a wall to block Mexican immigration to the US. He rode to power by courting an equally racist group of rural white working class voters.
Trump is an equal opportunity racist, as comfortable discriminating against Black people as Latinos or Muslims. His administration was notable for its lack of racial diversity and stories abounded about his openly racist language in private.
In office, he enacted racist policies such as the Muslim travel ban and the detention of Latin American migrants, and he fanned the flames of race based grievance time and time again, whether by refusing to disavow the Charlottesville protesters or seeking to whip up a frenzy about an ‘invasion’ from Mexico. He openly encouraged racist groups like the Proud Boys while refusing to acknowledge the death of civil rights hero and Democrat congressman John Lewis.
And when the murder of George Floyd sparked race riots across the US last summer, he refused to acknowledge the grievances of the Black Lives Matter movement and instead sided with white police. It was African Americans and Latinos who delivered the fatal blow to Trump’s Presidency by turning out in unprecedented numbers to vote for Joe Biden, and in Biden and Kamala Harris, herself of Jamaican and Indian heritage, they will have leaders determined to fight against racial injustice.
Loser: Normal Life
In a sense, Joe Biden’s victory should mean that America is no longer consumed by politics in the way it has been under Trump. A semblance of normal life, pre-Trump, should be able to resume. No more all caps tweets from the White House in the early hours of the morning. No more teargassing of peaceful protesters so the President can get his photo op in front of a church. No more bullying and shouting from the POTUS.
But the reality is that the resumption of normal life will be shortlived. There may be a brief hiatus of the conflict, a momentary reversion to civility, in the early days after Biden is inaugurated, but the Republicans have already shown they will not accept he has a mandate and they will do all they can to block him. Outside of Washington, the cultural wars will continue with the far right even angrier and more fired up after the defeat of their totem — a defeat they refuse to accept. America is cleaved into two halves — those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Biden — who barely recognise or understand each other, let alone agree with each other. It is hard to see how America will not become even more polarised and divided over the next four years, despite Biden’s attempts to heal these wounds.
Winner: the Rest of the World
Joe Biden’s victory has been greeted with global jubilation because it will mean the US once again being a constructive and active player on the world stage. Donald Trump was worse than an isolationist; he was openly hostile to the idea of global co-operation, pissing over institutions the US had helped set up such as the United Nations and the World Health Organisation. His pursuit of a so-called ‘America First’ agenda saw him playing footsie with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, while threatening to pull out of NATO.
He closely aligned himself with Israel and Saudi Arabia, ignoring the human rights abuses of both nations, thus inflaming tensions in the Middle East. He withdrew the US from the Paris Accord, setting back global efforts to combat climate change, and barely participated in other global forums. Just as importantly, the presence of someone like Trump in the White House gave encouragement to other right wing populists like Bolsonaro in Brazil and Duterte in the Philippines.
Now Joe Biden is faced with a similar task to Barack Obama of restoring America’s standing in the world community and contributing positively to global politics, but after four years of Trump he will be greeted with open arms by other world leaders, particularly those on continental Europe.
Loser: Vladimir Putin
Putin appears to have been unable to replicate his successful interference in the 2016 election which delivered Trump to the White House. The election of Trump and not Hillary Clinton in 2016 was a strategic success for Putin, who knew it would destabilise the US both domestically and internationally. The kowtowing by Trump to Putin was an unexpected bonus.
We will probably never know exactly why Putin has such a strong hold over Trump — no doubt it will be connected to his business interests — but Russia will now find a return to a less docile relationship with the US under Joe Biden.
