MORE than a month after a historic election yielded a change for the United States, the electoral college vote count is in. With this, Joe Biden has officially been affirmed as the winner of the 2020 presidential race after comfortably crossing the threshold of 270 electoral college votes. While this official confirmation of a Biden presidency gave members of the Republican party an opportunity to congratulate the incoming president, there are some — and foremost among them President Donald Trump — who are still in a deep state of denial. From the moment a Biden victory started looking possible, Mr Trump and his supporters threw every toy out of the proverbial pram to halt the vote count with the hope of changing the result. From legal challenges to incessant tweets, Mr Trump has dedicated a remarkable amount of energy and time to creating an ‘alternative reality’ for the consumption of his support base. Chaos has been the ruling theme of Mr Trump’s efforts to discredit the election and the fact that he lost. Mr Trump has still not conceded, as is customary for runners-up in American politics, and the days ahead will see the Republican Party digging its heels in on the electoral fraud claims. On Wednesday, a Wisconsin Republican senator held a hearing to probe the 2020 election by inviting two Trump campaign lawyers who tried to overturn the election results in Nevada and Wisconsin.

While there is little doubt that this voter fraud allegation is nothing but a fishing expedition, it can have serious consequences. Mr Trump will have to accept the truth eventually, but the period before he leaves the White House has seen him promote damaging election conspiracy theories that have largely been debunked. That a US president is disseminating falsehoods is troubling. Fortunately, the incoming president responded to Mr Trump by reiterating his conciliatory message from the early days of his projected victory. “I will be a president for all Americans. I will work just as hard for those of you who didn’t vote for me as I will for those who did.” He also reminded Mr Trump that in America, “politicians don’t take power — the people grant it to them”, and repeated his firm belief in an indestructible democracy. The days ahead promise to be challenging for Mr Biden, who not only has the gargantuan task of running the American government but also carrying an unprecedented burden of a trust deficit among millions of Republican voters.

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2020