The time of the Senate
In the end, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 306 votes to 232. The gap is considerable and is reinforced by just over four million popular votes. North Carolina fell at the last minute on the Republican side, as expected, by a 1.3 percent lead, while Arizona and Georgia, two traditionally Republican strongholds, leaned toward the Democratic candidate by 0.36 percent and 0.3 percent of the vote, respectively. It is a difficult but significant victory because Arizona has been won by Republicans since 1948 (then won by Democrat Harry Truman) and Georgia since 1992, when Bill Clinton won.
Two strongholds that have joined the Democratic camp this year, along with Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which voted for Trump in 2016, explain Joe Biden's victory in 2020. There is no doubt about his victory, and although Trump has assigned his lawyer Rudolf Giuliani to pursue lawsuits and claims, it is only a matter of time before Trump has no choice but to surrender the evidence and admit defeat, even though elegance is not exactly one of his trademarks, and leave a White House that Biden will have to redecorate quickly to eliminate as much gold as Donald and Melania have added.
Because it is one thing to ask for a vote count in cases where the result was very close, as in the aforementioned cases in Arizona and Georgia, which is perfectly justified and provided for by law, and it is another to say that illegal votes are being counted, that there was voter fraud, and that Biden stole the election because of widespread corruption. Because no such evidence has been found, and because Donald Trump has also failed to produce evidence of these serious charges. He has spent the last four years lying left and right, to the point where the New York Times lost count even though he had already been lying for several thousand years, and he is going to end his presidency as he began it by claiming that his inauguration ceremony was attended by more people than Obama's, even though the photos indicated otherwise.
At least we can't say he is inconsistent on this point because he entered the White House lying and left four years later lying too.
The case is serious for several reasons. The first is that he is lying and it is not right that the president of the most powerful country in the world should do so. The second reason is that his behaviour is more like that of a leader in Belarus or Zimbabwe than in the United States, which prides itself on democracy. Thirdly, because many of his followers believe what Trump says, they are angry and frustrated, and this contributes to polarising society if it doesn't lead to an act of violence, which in a country where everyone is armed, anything can happen. Fourth, because it delegitimizes the electoral process and democracy itself, not in the United States but around the world, and that's why the Chinese leaders, who were slow to congratulate Biden, say that the democratic system is something decadent and outdated compared to their own model of authoritarian (indeed totalitarian) capitalism.
Fifth, because it prevents a smooth and orderly transfer of power to Washington, which prevents, for example, Biden from attending the daily dispatches in which intelligence agencies report their greatest secrets and threats to national security. And in sixth place because what is happening is making the United States the laughing stock of the world, with many memes circulating on social networks that ridicule the situation and bring down the image and soft power of the United States. Today, only 30% of Europeans have a good image of the US, which is on a par with Russia or China, which doesn't make sense either.
There is speculation that Donald Trump will end up retiring to his Mar-a-Lago station to play golf and fight against judges, creditors and the Internal Revenue Service, while toying with the idea of launching a TV channel more to the right than Fox News (owned by Robert Murdoch), which thinks it has abandoned him. Some say that with the 70 million votes he has just won, more than in 2016, or 48% of the votes cast, and with his control of the Republican Party and the 88 million followers on Twitter, soon, Trump would already be considering running for the 2024 elections.
Now, the big battle that remains to be fought is that of the Senate. The Democrats have already dominated the House of Representatives and will continue to do so despite the loss of a few seats in this election. Their hope was to take the Senate from the Republicans, and they have not succeeded. At the moment, the Republicans have 50 seats against 48 for the Democrats, and there are 2 more seats at stake in Georgia that will be decided on 6 January. On that day, Republicans Loeffer and Perdue will face Democrats Warnock and Ossoff, and if the latter wins, there will be a tie of 50 senators for each party.
In that case, the tie would favour the Democrats because Vice President Kamala Harris, who is not a senator but chairs the Senate, has a casting vote. But it is only in the hypothetical case that Warnock and Ossoff would win, which will not be easy. Both parties know what they are playing for and that is why they are putting their weight behind them in Georgia, with huge sums of money in an election that broke records in this area too. For the power of the Senate is enormous and can prevent Biden from keeping his election promises and carrying out his policies themselves. For example, on the environment and his commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, or to preventing exploration off the coasts and in the Arctic Ocean, or the millions he wants to spend on renewable energy as part of the United States' return to the Paris Climate Treaty, which Biden says would take place "from the first day" of his presidency, just as he also wants to convene a summit of the world's most polluting countries in the first year.
So even though Biden won the presidency in good faith, Trump still won't accept his defeat and the swords are still in the Senate.