By the time this piece sees print, Joe Biden would have been inaugurated (Wednesday noon, January 20, 2021) as the 46th president of the United States. It will solemnize the dawn of his four-year term and that of Kamala Harris’s as his vice president.
Biden’s election did not go as smoothly as the previous US presidential elections. It has been tarnished by the outgoing POTUS Donald Trump, his Republican loyalists and thousands of MAGA (Make American Great Again) fanatics who believe in his false claims that the elections were rigged in favor of Biden. This bogus assertion—put forth even months before the November 3, 2020 election—has been debunked by numerous Republican state elections officials.
Dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its proxies have been rejected by judges in both state and federal courts—all the way to the Supreme Court—which found the election fraud claims insufficient in form and substance. Although no evidence were presented to support any of these baseless charges, Trump’s power to emasculate faith in American democracy is worrisome.
Despite these legal setbacks, Trump continued hawking his conspiracy theories in order to fuel seething anger among his followers who have now embraced the lie that Biden stole the election with the help of Dominion, Smartmatic and Hugo Chavez! For the life of me, I can’t figure out why such outrageous allegation was swallowed hook-line-and-sinker and then peddled by (Princeton University and Harvard Law School educated) Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump’s supporters in both lower and upper chambers of Congress, and—if surveys are to be believed—72 percent of Republican followers.
The incendiary rhetoric mouthed by Trump since the November elections could well have served as a powder keg that blew up on January 6 this year. In a rally to “stop the steal,” Trump—enabled by his son Donald Trump Jr. and lead lawyer former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani—egged on MAGA fanatics to march to the Capitol Building where legislators were to officially certify Biden’s win. While Giuliani mouthed, “If we are wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat,” Donald Jr. called on “[Republicans to] better fight for Trump. Because if they’re not, guess what? I’m going to be in your backyard in a couple of months!”
Reminiscent of how American cult leader, preacher and self-professed faith healer Jim Jones goaded his flock in Guyana to gulp a cup of cyanide-laced KoolAid, Trump told his followers at the rally near the White House on January 6: “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down…. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated.”
And like Jones’s cult members, a mob of his supporters—but without the promised physical presence of Trump—stormed the US Capitol to try to stop Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Trump and members of his family and staff stayed glued to the huge flat TV in the White House as the insurrection unfolded. The event was at the least embarrassing for the country. Until the Trump presidency, the United States has been exporting democracy and labeling as “rogues” nations that it felt did not adhere to democratic standards. The mob riot at the US Capitol also highlighted an internal problem that Biden has to confront along with other pressing issues: White Supremacy.
Throughout his reign, Trump has empowered the Southern pride. The Confederate battle flag that was in prominent display during the siege of the Capitol, along with gun-toting Proud Boys, and the neo Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who were in full force trying to be relevant in advocating that slavery is good for the country and that Black (or brown, yellow, or any other non-white) lives do not matter. Up to now, I do not understand how and why many masochist Blacks, Filipinos and other immigrants could adore Trump and are even proud to be associated with the hate groups who love him!
Now blocked by Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms for further inciting a divided nation, Trump has the ignominy of being the first POTUS to be impeached twice. But that doesn’t mean that he would be going quietly into the night. Already, he has busied himself pardoning people whom he thought could spill the beans on his alleged misconducts in the White House and who could later help him, perhaps, run again for the country’s highest office.
More than anything, I believe that Biden’s first order of business—along with other problems he has to tackle—is the growing influence of Racism, which already has spawned “Karens” in America’s midst. He has to nip the bud of the White Supremacist seed Trump has replanted and nurtured.
According to David Neiwert, Journalist and author of Alt-America, the far right carried out every extremist US murder based on an annual report of the anti-defamation league the database of which he helped create. They committed 115 acts of domestic terrorism, resulting in 79 deaths and over 100 injuries between 2008 and 2016. The most recent of which in the database was in Charlottesville in 2017 when James Fields Jr. rammed a Dodge Challenger at high speed into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 28 people. He is later convicted of first-degree murder.
Some Republican lawmakers are also not too keen in giving Biden a honeymoon period. Georgia 4th District Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a political neophyte known for promoting the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, has already made known she’s filing an impeachment complaint against Biden on his first day of office. She’s sure to find a willing ally in Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida’s 1st Congressional District, Jim Jordan of Ohio’s 4th Congressional district, and it is not far-fetched to see Sen. Josh Hawley giving her the much needed thumbs up. QAnon backers have pushed conspiracies on social media that include the baseless claim that Trump secretly is fighting a cabal of child-sex predators, among them prominent Democrats, figures in Hollywood and “deep state” allies.
The playbook is clear. The alt right will do its darn best to foment a legitimacy crisis, which they hope to haunt Biden’s administration. It is of the belief that when three-fourths of the followers of one of two major parties say they don’t trust the election results, the implication is that they won’t trust the incoming government. And a democracy relies on citizens’ trust.
It is a Herculean task but is doable given Biden’s record of competency and compassion. He has vowed to be a president for all, so it is incumbent that the first few years of his administration should be spent in trying to convince people on the other side of the political fence that the days of segregation and slavery are over. There are no more cotton fields where Whites pushed Blacks in back-breaking work, and the gruesome image of a ‘Whipped Peter’ is as real as the air they breathe. Biden also has to force Americans to relearn that democracy is not spontaneous. As Canadian President Justin Trudeau says: “It is a day-to-day work to uphold a political system where the losing side graciously concedes, and in which rival political parties between elections work together for the common good.”
For comments and suggestions, e-mail me at mvala.v@gmail.com