The Guardian view on the 2020 US elections
It’s time to dump Trump. America’s only hope is
Joe Biden
Four years of deranged and unpredictable behaviour is
proof that the current US president is uniquely unsuited to the job Support the
Guardian’s independent, open journalism
Tue 27 Oct
2020 18.30 GMTLast modified on Wed 28 Oct 2020 09.10 GMT
Donald
Trump’s presidency has been a horror show that is ending with a pandemic that
is out of control, an economic recession and deepening political polarisation.
Mr Trump is the author of this disastrous denouement. He is also the political
leader least equipped to deal with it. Democracy in the United States has been
damaged by Mr Trump’s first term. It may not survive four more years.
If the
Guardian had a vote, it would be cast to elect Joe Biden as president next
Tuesday. Mr Biden has what it takes to lead the United States. Mr Trump does
not. Mr Biden cares about his nation’s history, its people, its constitutional
principles and its place in the world. Mr Trump does not. Mr Biden wants to
unite a divided country. Mr Trump stokes an anger that is wearing it down.
The
Republican presidential nominee is not, and has never been, a fit and proper
person for the presidency. He has been . He displays a brazen disregard for
legal norms. In office, he has propagated lies and ignorance. It is astonishing
that his appear to sway his outlook on
the national interest. His government is cruel and mean. It effectively
sanctioned the kidnapping and of migrant
children by detaining them and deporting their parents. He has vilified
whistleblowers and venerated war criminals.
Mr Trump
trades in racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Telling the Proud Boys,
a far-right group that has endorsed violence, to “stand back and stand by” was,
in the , “a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn”. From the Muslim ban to
building a wall on the Mexican border, the president is grounding his base in
white supremacy. With an agenda of corporate deregulation and tax for the rich, Mr Trump is filling the swamp,
not draining it.
A
narcissist, Mr Trump seems incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others.
Coronavirus has exposed a devastating lack of presidential empathy for those
who have died and the families they left behind. Every day reveals the growing
gap between the required to be president
and Mr Trump’s ability. He is protected from the truth by cronies whose
mob-like fealty to their boss has seen six former aides sentenced to prison. A
post-shame politician, Mr Trump outrageously
of one of his favoured lackeys this summer. The idea that there is one
rule for wealthy elites and another for the ordinary voter damages trust in the
American system. Mr Trump couldn’t care less.
The
people’s enemy
Like other
aspiring autocrats, Mr Trump seeks to delegitimise his opposition as “enemies
of the people” to mobilise his base. In 2016, the institutions that should have
acted as a check on Mr Trump’s rise to power failed to stop him. This time
there has been some pushback over a Trump disinformation campaign about Mr
Biden’s son. It is an indictment of the Trump age that social media companies
acted before politicians in the face of a clear and present danger to
democracy.
Mr Biden
has his flaws, but he understands what they are and how to temper them. Seen as
too centrist in the Democratic primaries, his election platform has borrowed
ideas from the progressive wing of his party and incorporated a “green new
deal” and free college for the middle class. Mr Biden should not retreat into
his comfort zone. The failures of capitalism have been thrown into sharp relief
by the pandemic. If elected, he will raise taxes on richer Americans and spend
more on public services. This is the right and fair thing to do when a thin
sliver of America has almost half the country’s wealth.
It’s not
just Americans for whom Mr Biden is a better bet. The world could breathe
easier with Mr Trump gone. The threat from Pyongyang and Tehran has grown
thanks to President Trump. A new face in the White House would restore
America’s historic alliances and present a tougher test to the authoritarians
in Moscow and Beijing than the fawning Mr Trump. On climate change, Mr Biden
would return the United States to the Paris agreement and give the world a
fighting chance to keep global temperatures in check. With a President Biden
there would be a glimmer of hope that the US would return as a guarantor of a
rules-based international order.
Perhaps no
country has so much to lose from Mr Biden’s victory as Britain. It has the of being led by Boris Johnson, whom Democrats
bracket with Mr Trump as another rule-breaking populist. Mr Biden, a Catholic
proud of his Irish roots, has already warned the Johnson government that
it the Good Friday agreement in its
Brexit negotiations. Having left the EU, the UK can no longer be America’s
bridge across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, Britain has a prime minister who led
the country out of Europe just when an incoming President Biden would be
looking to partner with it.
Faustian
pact
Whether Mr
Trump is defeated or not next week, Americans will have to learn to live with
Trumpism for years to come. The first impeached president to run for
re-election, Mr Trump avoided being the first to be removed from office because
the Republican party has lost its moral compass. The party of Abraham Lincoln
has become subsumed by the politics of grievance and entitlement. The GOP turns
a blind eye to Mr Trump’s transgressions in return for preserving the
privileged status of white Christian America.
The most
obvious sign of this Faustian pact is the Senate’s confirmation of Amy Coney
Barrett to the US supreme court — Mr Trump’s third justice. Conservatives now
have a 6-3 advantage in the highest court in the land. Compliant judges are key
to retaining the status quo when Republicans face a shrinking electoral base.
The Republican strategy is twofold: first is voter suppression; if that fails,
Mr Trump appears ready to reject the result. He has spent years , especially
those armed to the hilt, to mistrust elections and to see fraud where it
doesn’t exist.
We have
been here before. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a
million ballots. The election turned on a handful of votes needed to capture
the electoral vote in Florida. But the votes that counted were not found in the
Sunshine State. They were cast by the five supreme court justices named by
Republican presidents who gave the election to George W Bush.
In the 2018
midterms, a coalition of millions marched into polling booths to disavow the
president. It is heartening that more than 60 million people have cast their
ballot in early voting at a time when the president is doing much to call US
democracy into question amid baseless claims of a “rigged election”. Americans
are busily embracing their democratic right, and a record turnout in this
election may show that voters, worried about whether democracy would endure,
strove to save it. Anything other than a vote for Mr Biden is a vote to unleash
a supercharged Trumpism. All pretence of civility would be dropped. The divides
of race, class and sex would become even wider. Mr Trump is a symptom of
America’s decline. Finding a solution to this problem begins with a vote for Mr
Biden.
Tue 27 Oct 2020 18.30 GMT
SEE
ALSO:
Electoral college explained: how Biden faces an uphill
battle in the US election
Trump won the presidency in 2016 despite Clinton
receiving almost 3m more votes, all because of the electoral college. How does
the system work?
Helena
Robertson, Ashley Kirk and Frank Hulley-Jones
Wed 28 Oct 2020 09.15 GMT
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