Joe Biden was just declared the 46th U.S. president. The election ended last Tuesday, but the race had remained undecided. It’s because the USA system of voting requires the counting of ballots that includes mail-in ballots that can take days to finish counting.
The contest for the White House therefore had been stuck for days. Incumbent Republican President Donald Trump as of yesterday had 214 electoral votes, and the challenger Democratic Joe Biden–former U.S. Senator from Delaware and Vice President with Barack Obama for eight years–had 253 votes. The race was centering mostly on four states where the victor remained undecided due to the time it takes to count the ballots: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. The latter is the original home of the peace-loving Quakers and both the birthplace and former home of Joe Biden.
Today, only minutes ago, the votes in Pennsylvania were tallied to place Joe Biden’s total count at 273, thereby attaining the golden threshold of 270 votes that must be attained in our electoral college system in order to be president. So, it was poetic that Joe Biden’s birthplace state was the final state that put him over the threshold. He had campaigned there vigorously in the closing days of the contest.
I have been an independent voter all of the adult life. But regarding the presidency of the U.S., I have voted Republican almost all of my life. I only voted for a Democrat for president with Barack Obama and then Hilary Clinton. In the 2016 election, I did not think Americans were presented with a very good choice. I didn’t think Ms. Clinton was very popular. Thus, I thought the Democratic party had made a mistake in choosing her. I believed that former Secretary of State Colin Powell would have accepted the Democratic nomination, if it had been offered to him, and that he would have beaten Donald Trump to become president. However, I did think that Ms. Clinton would do a satisfactory job as president if she had been elected, since she had done so as Secretary of State under the Obama presidency, and thus I voted for her to become president.
I did not vote for Republican Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election because I believed he was a great big liar, a crooked businessman, and a con-man. Thus, I believed he was very unfit for the job. I still believe that today. And I suspect that we will learn a lot more about this in the future since Donald Trump will be engaged for years to come in judicial proceedings in which he will be accused of various crimes.
I started my Kermit Zarley Blog, hosted by patheos.com, in the spring of 2013. I had never been passionate about politics although I did follow it. But when Donald Trump began to campaign for the U.S. presidency, in 2015, and then became the Republican nominee in 2016, I was very opposed to his becoming president. So much so that, I have written over 1,350 total posts on my blog to date, and in the past five years perhaps 150 of them have been against Donald Trump being president. At the same time, as a Christian, I prayed for President Trump in the execution of his presidential responsibilities. But I especially prayed for him as a man who I believe still was in need of a genuine, humbling, confessional experience with his Maker. I still believe that. I also believe that Donald Trump shamelessly used Christians, especially Evangelicals among which I still count myself, to further his goals in being the U.S. president.
What now? President Trump is still fighting. He is refusing to accept the defeat of this election and therefore the will of the people. He is challenging the integrity of our voting system, alleging that there has been voting fraud in several states. Yet there is no evidence of any such thing. Trump will not go down without a fight. He is a pugilist, and the presidential transition may not go peacefully. But this is a nation of laws, and they will be executed fully regarding the transition of the presidency.
As during his long business career as a developer and real estate mogul, Donald Trump is now lodging several lawsuits, this time against various states of our union. On Wednesday, the day after the election, he had falsely declared himself the winner of the contest. It was just one more lie of the over 20,000 lies or misleading statements that both The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other media outlets and fact checkers had tabulated that President Donald Trump had made in the three-and-a-half years of his presidency through mid-summer. Thus, it does not look like Donald Trump is going to go away without a big fight. But I believe that is just more of his bluster that will not work.
I believe. like a whole lot of Americans and especially historians, that Donald Trump was a threat to our democracy. That was the main reason I was opposed to his being president. I have stated perhaps over a dozen times on my blog that Donald Trump is a psychologically sick man, being a classic narcissist, and that that in itself made him unfit for the greatest job in the world–the president of the USA.
But it’s a whole lot more than that which has caused me to believe Donald Trump was unfit for the office of U.S. president. He is quite an unethical person due to a serious lack of moral compass. Being a narcissist, his passion has been to serve himself and constantly brag about himself, expounding all manner of lies in doing so. Donald Trump’s never-ending braggadocio has been so nauseating to me.
During the later part of Donald Trump’s presidency, he was telling the American people that he should be their president for life, thus going beyond the maximum two terms that total eight years as stipulated in our Constitution. Trump was glorifying dictators of nations around the world and alienating our democratic allies. He spoke so well and so often of Russian President Vladimir Putin that Americans kept wondering why it looked like Putin had Trump in Putin’s back pocket. As Trump’s niece Mary Trump has written in her recent book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Donald Trump was becoming a threat to our democracy. The world was watching the U.S., wondering what was happening with the megalomaniac Donald Trump as its president, who was breaking all kinds of norms if not laws.
Joe Biden will be pretty good at keeping this country united. That was the worst thing about Donald Trump for our country. If you just lay aside the situation concerning the Civil War, (I think Abraham Lincoln was unquestionably the greatest U.S. president), Donald Trump was the most divisive president the USA has ever had. But Biden will be the opposite of that. He was known as a senator who worked effectively across the aisle.
Regarding our racism, Biden was Obama’s VP; Obama and Biden are true friends; Obama campaigned strongly for Biden in the last days of this contest; and Biden selected Kamala Harris as his VP, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican parents. On the other hand, Trump was doing very poorly regarding race relations.
But the main thing that ended Donald Trump’s presidency was probably his miserable handling of the coronavirus pandemic called COVID-19 that has engulfed our country and the whole world these past eight months. He really failed the country by lying to us about that, disregarding our infectious diseases experts and even mocking them and their COVID guidelines. He refused to wear a mask and social distance and thereby became a horrible example to Americans in order to survive this pandemic as well as possible. By year’s end, authorities estimate the U.S. will have suffered nearly 400,000 deaths from this pandemic. Trump’s lies about COVID really sunk his presidency.
But now, with Joe Biden as president, democracy is alive and well in the good ‘ole USA. Yes, this is still the United States of America.
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