"Donald Trump has debased the American presidency to its lowest point."
"Donald Trump has debased the American presidency to its lowest point."Having been in isolation for 15 nights here in Taipei, mandatory for all coming from countries which are considered “high risk” due to the pandemic, there was little for me to do except watch the continuing coverage of the US elections, from the final days of the campaign, to the tedious canvass of votes.
And on my first day of “liberation,” it was clear that despite all the insane tweets of the incumbent president, it was only a matter of time before the Biden-Harris tandem would get the threshold number of electoral votes. The decency in Joe Biden was evident throughout the canvass, where despite irreversible statistical trends evident two days after the voting, he refused to claim victory, even as Trump was threatening to go to every court and all the way to the Supreme Court to contest the outcome.
I woke up at five Sunday morning and immediately tuned in to CNN, where I learned about the threshold being reached, with the victors supposed to go on live television from Delaware to address their nation at 8 p.m. Saturday, US eastern time—9 a.m. here and in the Philippines.
For the US of A and the observing world, it was a historic moment. America had elected not only its first woman vice-president, but also one of Asian and African descent in the person of Kamala Harris of California, breaking the barriers of race and gender.
“I will strive to be a vice-president like Joe Biden was—loyal, honest and prepared, waking up every day thinking of you and your family, for now is when the hard work begins”, she declared, finally uttering the refrain that their team kept defining as their mission: “to heal the soul of the nation.”
Indeed, America needs healing. America needs to unite.
That 70 million still voted for a man who personified what was “ugly” in America, a man for whom lying came as first nature and whose decision point was always a matter of transaction, who was always full of himself, who had neither character nor compassion, and whose incompetence was laid bare by the raging pandemic he foolishly ignored, and even propagates by word and reckless action, says something about the deep divisions of the fractured nation.
Worse, Donald Trump, who has debased the American presidency to its lowest point, still refusing to concede and still ignoring reality (up to the time of this writing), keeps his nation and people hostage to the threats of violence coming from his extremely fanatical loyalists.
Meanwhile, leaders of the Republican Party have mostly maintained the “silence of the lambs” even as deep wounds continue to be inflicted not only upon their party but upon the nation itself by this egotistic creature. It is to the credit of some card-carrying Republicans, ashamed of the kind of person their party has championed, that they came up with the “Lincoln Project,” inspired by the history of the Grand Old Party once led by one of America’s greatest men, Abraham Lincoln, to campaign against the Donald.
But all that is past, or should be, unless Trump wants himself hauled bodily out of the White House by the Secret Service, screaming like a madman come the 20th of January next year.
Joseph Biden, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, of working-class descent, whose family moved to neighboring Delaware, seemed to have a bright political future ahead of him when he was elected at 29 as the youngest senator his state chose to send to Washington D.C. He would become of constitutional age after he took his seat, one he was about to give up because his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident the day he was to go to the federal Capitol. Another personal tragedy happened when his eldest son, Joseph “Beau” Biden died of brain cancer in 2015, an event that led him to not seek the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency, even as he had been twice the vice-president of the popular Barack Obama, the first African-American to lead the United States.
That paved the way, ironically, for the ascendance of Donald Trump, who defeated Hillary Clinton by electoral vote majority, despite the latter winning the popular vote. It was a bruising, dirty campaign where social media was used by Trump and his cohorts to demonize Sen. Clinton. He appealed to the basest instincts of the preponderant white majority who felt that their nation was being stolen from them by immigrants and African-Americans. To this day, many of these remain his fanatics.
And that is where the danger lies. That too is why Joseph Biden, who will turn 78 come November 20, whose personal tragedies steeled his character, now has his mandate cut out for him—to heal his nation and unify his people.
Which is where the 50 states of the American Union, forged in the crucible of a deadly Civil War at the time when Abraham Lincoln was president, the Great Emancipator, is looked upon by the rest of humanity. It is in unity despite diversity—of religion, gender, ethnicity and the color of one’s skin, which makes it such a great nation.
“E pluribus unum,” the motto that appears on the Great Seal of the USA, immortalizes this diversity that despite great odds in its history, has forged their Union.
Biden’s victory message encapsulated his role. It is the reason why God and his people had chosen him despite his old age, to become America’s 46th president, at a time of great peril, with a pandemic killing more than 230,000 and rising, and an economy shrunk by the impact of a viral contagion that has shut down businesses and thrown millions jobless.
He should be both a “medicine man,” a healer leading his people to safety through the effective use of science rather than the rants of insanity, and a unifier that would heal, in his own chosen words, the “soul of the nation.”
It is going to be tough.
