Joe Biden was recognized as president-elect by most of the US media and by many foreign leaders, including those whom Donald Trump referred to as his friends.
Nevertheless, the President is ready to unleash a legal war and go through it to the end, especially since there are already the first successes on this path, and the resource that he can have is impressive. The trouble is that Trump will now certainly be betrayed – it will be better for the country as a whole.
“Since when have mainstream media been announcing who will be our next president?” – Trump asks resentfully on Twitter. The feelings of the incumbent president are easy to understand, but he is clearly disingenuous — it is the media that have been announcing him, and for many years.
The United States has no counterpart to the Central Election Commission, and electoral laws differ from state to state. Choosing between Trump and Biden, the Americans essentially voted for a team of electors – Democrats or Republicans, who, 41 days after the popular plebiscite, will gather for a board and will officially elect the head of state there, based on their own party affiliation.
All we have so far are the verdicts of the electoral commissions of most states and the standard rules of arithmetic. They are merciless to Trump: at the college in December, Biden will have a sufficient number of his electors – at least 273. Unless, of course, the team of the current president succeeds in protesting the results in a number of constituencies and thereby changing the statewide alignment.
In practice, we are talking about challenging 10-40 thousand votes in each of at least three states, where the gap is minimal, and there are complaints about the organization of the electoral process. These are Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia.
Somewhere, like Michigan, hundreds of dead people are found voting. Somewhere, like in Nevada, a fantastically record turnout has been fixed, possibly due to the participation of non-voting migrants. Somewhere, like in Arizona, due to the peculiarities of counting, votes from Trump-supporting rural counties could not be counted. Somewhere, like Pennsylvania, electoral commissions continued to accept ballots that arrived after election day and eventually eliminated Trump’s advantage.
By the way, in Pennsylvania, the law obliged observers to keep from the counting points of ballots at a distance of about nine meters. Formally – because of the coronavirus.
The elections, where observers as “possible sources of infection” have to observe literally with binoculars or even stand behind closed doors, were recently held in Belarus.
As a result, the president’s legal landing party will have to first prove the fact of a violation of the law in one case or another, then – that this violation influenced the result, and, finally, to annul the votes in sufficient quantity. And this, we repeat, is in at least three states out of six proposed. There is a large-scale legal war that needs to be won on several fronts at once and in the shortest possible time – before the meeting of the board.
The Republicans already have their first victories. For example, in Georgia, where a person sits in the governor’s chair, a recount has been announced. And in Pennsylvania, the almighty Supreme Court ordered the separation of votes received by mail after polling stations closed, pending further orders. But these are only initial steps, and ultimately there must be too many stars converging for Biden to become president.
For this reason, according to CNN, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, advised the patron to admit defeat. But Trump is showing intent to go to the end of this war. According to knowledgeable people, he simply does not know how to act in another way – he hates losing so much.
The peculiarity of the current situation is that sooner or later they will get to the bottom of the truth (that is, at best, political technologies, and, at worst, frankly fraudulent schemes that ensured the election of Biden) – the Republicans will have enough resources for this. But this does not mean the restoration of justice in relation to Trump specifically – a second term simply is unlikely to be provided for him.
So far, the native party promises not to leave him in trouble. For example, the leader of the Republican minority in the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy vowed to do everything to change the election results in a legal way. Other status party members speak in the same spirit, with the exception of those who can be attributed to the president’s personal enemies (first of all, these are neocons – supporters of armed interventions in other countries like former President George W. Bush or Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who was the only Republican to vote to impeach Trump).
However, at the next stage, Trump will be betrayed by them. This development of events seems irrevocable due to the divergence of his personal interests with those of the party.
Both sides of the conflict recognize that America is now in an unprecedented political crisis that is damaging the country and its image. In trying to stay in the White House, Trump is not only exacerbating the gap between liberal and conservative America, but also discrediting the United States as a state and its entire political system.
So far, under his blows, only the plaster flew off the facade, but in the future the damage will increase.
A peaceful way out of a political crisis always implies a compromise between the parties to the conflict. But there is no compromise on which Trump would remain president: in this case, the Democrats would not receive anything, although as a result of their special operation they have the right to claim a lot.
Republicans, by contrast, have quite a lot of room to maneuver. Despite the impending loss of the White House, they will continue to occupy an advantageous position: a significant conservative majority has been formed in the Supreme Court, and the Senate (unless a miracle happens) will remain under Republican control. In practice, this means that for at least two more years, the Conservatives will be able to stop the unacceptable steps from the Biden administration and prevent the appointment of radicals to it.
At the same time, it is vitally important for the Republicans to seal the holes through which the winning votes have flowed to Biden. The problem is already localized in the liberal metropolitan areas of the oscillating states – Atlanta (Georgia), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), as well as in the almost entirely African American Detroit (Michigan) and Las Vegas (Nevada), where the share of illegal migrants is high.
It is fundamental now not even to punish the violators who have abused the dominance of local democrats and the covert practice of mass postal voting, but to amend the legislation in these states to close the “windows of opportunity” described above. This will not be achieved without agreements with local Democrats, which means that Trump must leave. Whatever the deal between the two main US parties on electoral reforms and the general course in Washington becomes, he fits into it only as a victim on the part of the Republicans.
Moreover, in an era of crisis (political or COVID), it is especially convenient to criticize the executive branch from the opposition, preparing for revenge in four years – it is unlikely that Biden will be re-elected.
The possibility of a compromise is now being discussed under the banner of “returning to normalcy”. It will heal an acute crisis, bring order to electoral legislation in disputed states, and cut off radicals from power: from the Democratic side – the left, and from the Republican side – Trump personally.
If, after the court battles, he is not pushed in the back by his own people, it will be strange from the point of view of not only long-term tasks, but also the very nature of relations between him and the party. In recent years, the president has managed to renew its vanguard at the expense of figure-oriented politicians, but for the established Republican elite, he is an openly alien element: four years ago, it tried its best just to prevent Trump from winning the primaries.
However, there is a factor due to which this whole theoretically beautiful and beneficial scheme for both parties can collapse in an instant: this is Trump’s stubbornness and selfishness. If they are really as strong as is commonly believed, he will not accept defeat, betrayal, or an exchange that implies his inglorious departure.
In the last elections, he received more than 70 million votes – more than any other Republican has received. This gives him the moral right to run for office again – in four years, which will nullify all agreements with the Democrats and split the conservative electorate.
It is unlikely that he will be elected president, on the contrary, his nomination against everyone, most likely, will ensure the election of Biden’s successor. But the “great old party”, as Republicans call themselves, will have to pay for betrayal, which can be a top priority for a vindictive, narcissistic, and extraordinary politician like Trump, as opposed to arbitrarily blissful compromises within the “Washington swamp”.
Dmitry Bavyrin, VZGLYAD