 Joe and Jill Biden make a Veterans Day visit on Wednesday to the Korean War Memorial Park in Philadelphia. ( |
Since the numbers in Biden’s column now make up an insurmountable margin for Trump to overcome, the Trump campaign is now saying that the computers in certain states switched votes from him to Biden. This has been thoroughly debunked. This afternoon, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security circulated a statement by the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, a group of federal, state, and local officials, declaring that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” of tampering with any voting systems.
Perhaps more to the point, Trump has been telling people that he will announce a run for the 2024 presidency as soon as the vote is certified for Biden. This would keep money flowing into his pockets, as well as keeping him in the news. Sources have told Maggie Haberman at the New York Times that the president has no grand strategy other than to keep his supporters energized to follow him into whatever he does next, including, perhaps, launching a competitor to the Fox News Channel.
Meanwhile, the president is holed up in the White House, his public schedule empty, tweeting about how he has won an election that everyone knows he lost.
One of the things he is ignoring is the devastating spread of coronavirus through this country. Today more than 153,000 new cases were reported, with 66,000 people hospitalized. More than 10.4 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 242,000 have died.
While the White House election night watch party has turned into a superspreader event, today ensnaring former 2016 Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, most infections are now caused not by large public events but by small gatherings at home: dinner parties, carpools, playdates. These indoor events create “perfect conditions for a virus that can spread among people who are crowded into a poorly ventilated space,” write the doctors and public health officials at the PolicyLab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Cases are not only on the rise, but also more severe. Experts remind us that we should avoid spending more than 15 minutes within six feet of anyone outside our own household in any 24-hour period, and they beg people to stay home for the holidays this year.
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Warren Harding won the White House in 1920 by promising a “Return to Normalcy” after eight exhausting years of President Woodrow Wilson, which included mismanagement of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, the League of Nations ratification debacle after World War I and the Red Scare orchestrated by the villainous Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Campaigning in Boston that year, Harding promised: “Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational. America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.”
Biden echoed this sentiment in his victory speech here on Saturday night when he declared: “The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow and a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” (Every American should hope that Biden’s presidency goes better than Harding’s, which was plagued by corruption and ended with the president’s death.)