Statement by President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday’s election results:
“I am honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect Harris.
In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America.
With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation.
It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.
We are the United States of America. And there’s nothing we can’t do, if we do it together.”
Statement from President Trump:
Text of a statement from President Donald Trump on the election result:
“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over. Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor. In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process. Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.
“Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election. It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.
“So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”
The statement was issued while Trump was golfing at his club in Virginia.
This election showed us just who we are as a nation — and it’s not very pretty | Opinion
Forgive me for being the ant at the picnic.
Certainly, this is a glad moment, an ecstatic and delirious moment. The election of 2020 has ended at last. Joe Biden is finally the president-elect and Donald Trump is finally consigned to the dank well of ignominy he so richly deserves.
As Gerald Ford once said in the aftermath of a less dire threat, “Our long national nightmare is over.” As the Munchkins of Oz once sang, “Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead.”
But if gladness is mandated, caveats are required. America needed an emphatic rejection that left no doubt the chaos, lies, lawlessness, bigotry and ignorance Trump represented were not, as some of us are overly fond of claiming, “who we are as a people.” We needed to deliver him a thundering, emphatic rejection.
And we did not. To the contrary, a victory that should have been an overwhelming landslide had to be eked into existence. Indeed, even in defeat, Trump actually improved on his 2016 popular vote count by — at this writing — roughly 7 million.
Think about that. After he bungled a pandemic (236,000 Americans dead), after he botched the economy (nearly 5 million jobs lost — more than any president since World War II), after he alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, after he undermined every government institution down to, and including, the National Weather Service, after he extorted Ukraine, occupied Portland and declared war on Lafayette Square, and after he embraced an agenda of brazen white supremacy, after, in other words, they lost the excuse of ignorance because they knew exactly what he was, 7 million more people cast their ballots for Trump.
Yes, he lost. Yes, Biden tallied more votes than any candidate in history and, of course, won the Electoral College. But the caveat looms large. Faced with a clear choice between good and evil, America did the right thing, barely. That is sobering and profoundly disappointing.
And it strips bare all the glossy claims about who we are as a country, underscoring the fact that in a meaningful sense, we are not one country at all anymore, but two sharing the same borders. The last time that happened, it took four years and 750,000 lives to force us back into some semblance of oneness. Even then, the seams of the fracture were always visible.
Unlike that break, this one is not starkly geographic: South versus North. No, this one is city versus country, college educated versus high school educated and, most significantly, future versus past. Meaning that yesterday, this was a nation where white people were the majority, and tomorrow it will be one where they are not.
The fear and resentment that inspires in many white people cannot be overstated. It has warped our politics for years, culminating in the disaster of Trump. Now Biden is elected on a promise to heal those breaks, but that will require more than a good man’s good intentions. It will require white Americans to divest a system of white supremacy that, let’s face it, has been very, very good to them.
Unfortunately, it has been less good for the country. So a moral reckoning is required here. It is time more white Americans finally recognize that white supremacy is not something you compromise with or rationalize. It must be a deal breaker, always. And it isn’t, as evidenced by the fact that the man who called Mexicans rapists and Haiti, El Salvador and the nations of Africa “shithole countries,” who described neo-Nazis as “very fine people” and told four Congresswomen of color to “go back” where they came from just won 7 million more votes than he did in 2016.
That’s “who we are as a people.” Let us stop kidding ourselves about that.
And start figuring out how to become what we said we were all along.
