WASHINGTON: Donald Trump faced one of the darkest days of his presidency on Wednesday with Congress poised to certify Joe Biden’s White House victory and Democrats on track to take control of the Senate with a pair of stunning upset victories in Georgia.

Thousands of Trump supporters, fuelled by his spurious claims of voter fraud, were flooding the nation’s capital, meanwhile, to protest the certification.

Trump is scheduled to address his backers before noon at an outdoors event in chilly Washington, two hours before Congress meets in a joint session to certify the Electoral College results that determine the winner of the White House race.

With political tensions running at fever pitch, there was a heavy police presence in downtown Washington and many business owners, fearing clashes, have boarded up doors and windows.

“They stole our election,” said Katherine Caldwell, a 61-year-old woman from Oregon wearing a white cowboy hat that read “Trump is my president.”

Certification of the Electoral College vote at a ceremony presided over by the vice president is usually just a formality. But more than 100 Republican members of the House of Representatives and at least a dozen Republican Senators have said they plan to lodge objections to certification at the joint session of Congress which opens at 1pm. Trump, 74, has refused to concede defeat in the November 3 election and has been ramping up the pressure on fellow Republicans and Vice President Mike Pence to back his baseless claims of election fraud.

“The vice president has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency.”

The vice president has no legal authority to reject the results, however, and Pence has given no public indication of what he will do at the joint session.

The Republican objections appear doomed to fail in any case when brought to a vote in the Democratic-controlled House and also in the Republican-majority Senate, where most Republicans have refused to sign on to the challenge to Electoral College certification.

The joint session of Congress comes one day after voters went to the polls in Georgia and appear to have handed a pair of stunning victories to the Democratic Senate candidates over their Republican opponents.

A Democratic sweep would result in a 50-50 split in the Senate with Democrats holding the tie-breaking vote in Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden is due to be sworn in on January 20 and control of the Senate would give his Democrats the levers of power in the executive branch and both chambers of Congress and allow him to push through his legislative agenda.

Georgia has been reliably Republican but Biden also won the state, by about 12,000 votes, and his win there is one of the victories that Trump has been contesting.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2021