By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
“In very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth” (Exodus 9:16 KJV).
This is what God said to Pharaoh about 4,000 years ago.
And God has repeated it to Donald Trump in 2020, to the hearing of all other tyrants everywhere, born and yet unborn, such as Maha Vajiralongkorn of Thailand, Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Americans have rejected Trump and voted Joe Biden president, mandating him to clean up four years of chaos, abuse, divisiveness, and shame, and to restore dignity, calm, and steadiness to the Oval Office, the most powerful seat in the world.
Biden won 279 Electoral College votes, powered by some Republican and swing states Trump won in 2016 which deserted him this year and joined Democratic strongholds to produce nine more than the 270 required to clinch the White House.
Votes are still being counted in four states – Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Biden leads in Arizona, which has 11 Electoral College votes, and Georgia, which has 16. If he wins both states as expected, his Electoral College tally will be 306.
Trump has 214 Electoral Colleges votes and leads in Alaska (3) and North Carolina (15). If he wins both states as expected, his Electoral College tally will be 232.
Biden also won the majority vote by four million, the highest number of votes won by a U.S. presidential candidate in history. Even as the votes are still being counted, he has scored 75.4 million against 71 million won by Trump.
Trump – socked at the failure of his well-choreographed lies, and illegal and immoral tactics to win re-election – has gone to court to challenge the vote count in some states but has so far lost as many lawsuits as filed.
Even if he wins any case in court, it will not change the result of the election. The courts in the U.S. do not overturn the will of voters.
Trump has vowed not to concede victory to Biden. That is mere grandstanding. The law does not require a defeated candidate to concede. It is only done by convention.
What is required by law in the U.S. is for a sitting president during election to prepare ahead of time handover notes for an incoming one, whether or not the incumbent himself may win re-election.
At the request of lawmakers, Trump produced to the House of Representatives last month handover notes being prepared.
Turnout was historic. A positive curve in the plethora of social and economic turmoil in the United States this year.
Before Election Day on November 3, a record 101 million – 63 per cent of projected turnout of 160 million – had cast their ballots in person and by post.
The final tally, which will take weeks, has already surpassed the total 136.5 million votes cast in 2016. A turnout of 160 million will be 66.6 per cent of the 240 million registered voters, the highest since 1908 when it was 65.7 per cent.
Biden’s victory will facilitate legislation to plug loopholes ruthlessly and shamelessly exploited by Trump, whom critics label as America’s most corrupt and incompetent president ever.
On December 18, 2019, Trump became the third U.S. president ever impeached, though his impeachment in the House of Representatives was cleared in the Senate.
He is also now the third president in four decades voted out of office after one term; since Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and George H. Bush (1989-1993).
Biden wins in third attempt
Biden won in his third shot, after failed bids in 1988 and 2008. He will be the oldest U.S. president at first term inauguration on January 20, 2021, when he will be 78.
He returns to the White House as the main man on the crest of an impressive 47 years of public service, spanning 36 years as U.S. senator, topped up with eight years as vice president to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.
A Democratic grandee and quintessential Washington insider, he has a vast experience of legislative and executive workings to handle domestic cultural fault lines, and of foreign policy to restore the U.S. to global leadership abdicated by Trump.
Harris of many firsts
Biden will be assisted by Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman of multi-hyphenated backgrounds, and of many firsts, that include attorney general of California, America’s most populous state, where she was a tough prosecutor from 2011 to 2017.
In 2017, she became the second Black woman ever elected U.S. senator, and then launched her quest for president in January 2019 but dropped out in December and endorsed Biden.
Harris, 56, is a first generation American. By that, she is, by all metrics, the most visible poster woman of the American Dream.
She was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, who met while students in the U.S. She attended both primary and high schools in Canada and returned to the U.S. to study at Howard University, Washington D.C., a Historically Black University.
She then earned a law degree at the University of California, Hastings.
Harris is the first woman, the first Jamaican-American, the first Indian-American, the first African-American, and the first Black woman elected U.S. vice president.
The job, a breath away from the Oval Office itself, equips her to help heal racial wounds, as well as ensure justice for all Americans.
Why God permitted Trump to become president
God knows that Trump is not morally fit for office. Any office.
And God knows that Trump falsely claims to be a Christian in order to win evangelical voters and hide under the banner of Christianity to do evil – and boast about it.
God knows and sees “the end” of all things “from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10 KJV).
“And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:12-13 NKJV).
The Almighty God Himself knew beforehand that Trump would commit atrocities in the White House but permitted him to become president so that through Trump societal abuses would be exposed and tackled.
“To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 NKJV).
God raised Trump up to the most powerful and most visible office in the world for all of mankind to see and learn from Trump’s deliberate abuses and cruelties, so that every nation on earth will make and enforce laws to check such evils in its territory.
Biden must work with Congress to make and enforce laws to correct the flaws in presidential powers and privileges, and flaws in the legal, political, social, and economic systems in the U.S., which Trump brazenly expanded and exploited.
The failings of Trump
Trump, 74, attracts criticism from reasonable people everywhere, at home and abroad, including from German Chancellor Angela Markel who, referring to Trump, said: “You don’t fight a virus with lies” – as reported by CNN.
The United Kingdom touts a special relationship with the U.S, and Trump and Johnson are supposed to be allies.
But Johnson has long paused trade talks with the U.S. due to what a UK official called the “venal corruption” of Trump and members of his family. Downing Street would resume the talks if Biden won, the source quoted by Daily Express said before the vote.
Even members of Trump’s family denounce him.
His niece, Mary Trump, published a book which details his fraudulent lifestyle from his teenage years, including paying someone to write his Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for him, with which he gained admission into university.
His elder sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, expressed outrage over his “cruelty” in separating children from immigrant mothers at the U.S.-Mexico border, and his “phoniness” and “lies”.
These were Maryanne’s words in a telephone conversation with Mary, which Mary taped and gave The Washington Post to publish.
On the tape, Maryanne also confirmed that Trump paid a man to write his SAT.
He fuels his core base of non-college educated white males who lap up his toxic racial rhetorics, which did not abate even when Americans of colours marched in nationwide protests in May against police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.
Across the world, on boulevards and in alleyways, in parks and squares, people of conscience; men, women, old, young, of all races, also joined in solidarity protests; on foot, in wheelchairs, and in pushchairs. Trump refused to speak healing.
Rather, he has since entrenched himself deeper in incendiary bravado, pandering to his base of White extremists.
Coalition against Trump
Trump has a hold over his supporters like a cult leader, they gave him more than 70 million votes, more than 47 per cent of the vote, the second highest total in American history, yet he is the first president to lose the popular vote in consecutive elections.
In 2016, he lost the popular vote to Clinton by three million; in 2020, he lost it to Biden by four million and still counting.
The majority of Americans do not support Trump.
They say he tramples both the moral code and the law; undermines the judicial system, the electoral process, and democracy as a whole – and denies responsibility for his actions.
Appalled fellow Republicans defected, formed Super Political Action Committees (Super-PACs), campaigned against him, and voted Biden.
In national polls, Trump has a 24 percentage point deficit with women overall. Yet, before and all through the campaign, he demeaned and alienated women.
On October 17, 2020 – 17 days before Election Day – thousands of women took to the streets in Washington, and in hundreds of other cities across America, from New York down to San Francisco, to get out voters to vote him out.
Women’s March, organisers of the protest, began opposition to Trump with a massive rally in Washington a day after his inauguration on January 20, 2017.
Suburban women, college-educated professionals who voted Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, supported Biden 65 per cent in national polls before the ballot in 2020, many expressing disgust and shame for having backed Trump four years ago.
Throughout the campaign, Biden had a solid national poll lead over Trump.
Yet Democrats did not relent. They energised and ramped up their base, in zealous fundraising and in voter mobilisation – among the Black, the White, Asian, and the Latinx. They drew in Independents, too.
Democrats ran the race as if they were trailing.
They had learnt hard lessons in 2016 when Clinton led national polls – and beat Trump by three million popular votes – yet lost to him by a whisker in the Electoral College count.
Trump began fundraising for his second term right from the day he was sworn into office. But Biden outraised and outspent him in the final stretch in 2020.
Plus the Democratic base and its leaners were enthusiastic to vote.
Stench of incompetence, corruption, immorality
The litany of the failings of Trump listed by critics also include.
- Trump mismanaged coronavirus that has infected 10,292,492 Americans and killed 243,771 and counting.
- The pandemic has tanked the economy; 20 million Americans are jobless. The unemployment rate is 7.9 per cent, the highest on record just before a presidential ballot.
- He announced on October 1 that he and his wife had been infected with coronavirus, and he was hospitalised for three days. Yet he continues – and encourages others to continue – to flout his own government’s guidelines to prevent its spread.
- He is a multiple adulterer, having sex even with prostitutes, one of whom – on record – he paid $130,000 to keep silent in the thick of the 2016 campaign. Stormy Daniels has written a book about her tryst with Trump, describing even his penis.
- He has again asked the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare, without a replacement, leaving 20 million Americans without health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. The hearing is scheduled for November 10.
- He is a rabid racist – openly, in words, in actions.
- When he meets any situation, good or bad, he makes it worse.
- To destabilise, and divide and rule America, Trump floats false conspiracy theories of his own, amplified by the right wing media, anchored by Fox News.
- He enables right wing and white supremacist groups who traffic false conspiracy theories. Among them QAnon the FBI labels a domestic terrorist group.
- He insults and abuses anyone who does not fawn on him, political allies and opponents alike. He has no regard for his predecessors, including George W. Bush, a fellow Republican; and Obama, who is well respected by most Americans.
- He treats foreign leaders with the same disrespect, among them Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a neighbour Trump publicly called “double faced”; documented by CNN.
- In one telephone conversation with Theresa May when she was British prime minister, Trump called her a “loser” – chronicled for CNN by Bob Woodward, a respected investigative journalist who honed his skill probing Watergate.
- Trump deploys particularly caustic words against women. He calls House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, “crazy” on twitter, Clinton “crooked”; and Harris “mean”, “nasty”, a “mad woman” and “a monster”.
- On August 6, 2015, then Fox News host, Megyn Kelly, moderated the first Republican presidential debate, where she reminded Trump: “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”
- Days after the debate, Trump lashed out at Kelly, telling CNN, “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
- He labelled NBC host Samantha Guthrie “crazy” on October 16, 2020 for daring to press his feet to the fire and not allowing him to get away with lies at a town hall she moderated in Miami, Florida the previous day.
- Because of Trump’s misogyny, national polls before the 2020 election showed that women broke more than 15 percentage points overall for Biden over him, more than the 13-point advantage Clinton had with women in 2016.
- U.S. media is awash with stories of how Trump implements mainly official policies that advance his own personal interests and agenda, instead of the public good.
- He appointed as White House advisers both his daughter, Ivanka; and her husband, Jared Kushner, in his elaborate con to run America as a personal estate where citizens become servants held captive to his lies, irrational impulses, mood swings.
- He has all but stopped legal immigration to the U.S., a nation of immigrants, which welcomed both his own grandparents (from Germany), his mother (from Scotland), and his wife, Melania (from Slovenia).
- Under his watch, “children are still being separated from their families and placed into detention” at the border, according to an article published in The Guardian (UK) on September 28, 2020.
- Trump claims to be anti-abortion but, under his watch, this article adds that “mothers of the separated children have been forced to have hysterectomies” (medical operations that remove parts or all of women’s wombs).
- This immoral tale, as recounted by The Guardian, has led to “some rank-and-file anti-abortion workers resigning rather than stomach supporting Trump.”
- This is another evidence, if single-issue evangelical voters who back him need be reminded, that Trump is a patently false Christian. Being a conservative does not make you a Christian, let alone a “born again” Christian (John 3:3).
“Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven …. I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:21-23 KJV).
No one, even if he claims to be a Christian, will enter Heaven if he obeys one Biblical command but deliberately disobeys other commands (James 2:10).
- Trump – who does not read The Bible, and has stated publicly that he does not seek forgiveness from God – only hides under Christianity to pursue his own interests and his own agenda (Philippians 2:21).
- He claims to voluntarily forfeit his $400,000 salary, but has, through his properties and other businesses, abused his office to profit more than $73 million from unethical dealings since he became president in 2017.
- To line his own pocket, Trump invited Vice President Mike Pence to his golf course in Ireland and billed tax payers for the period Pence stayed.
- He shuns Camp David and other official retreats, and instead has spent about a third of his presidency in his properties, including Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida where he invites guests to his private club on the estate who pay fees.
- Trump, as reported by The Atlantic and other U.S. media, rents out chalets to Secret Service personnel who accompany him to his properties and charges tax payers $650 per day for each agent.
- He concocts daily, an average 23 lies or misleading statements.
- He has sued or been sued to court more than 4,000 times, highlighting a man in dodgy dealings. Many of the lawsuits, filed before and after he became president, are still in court. He faces trouble once he leaves office and loses immunity.
- By cooking the books, he paid little or no federal tax in the last two decades; and paid only $750 federal tax in 2016 and 2017, per expose by The New York Times.
Biden’s economic agenda
Biden proposes a “caregiving economy” with new tax credits for those who care for children, seniors and disabled people, as well as building tens of thousands of new child-care facilities.
He detailed his plan in a speech on July 21 in New Castle, Delaware as part of his “build back better” economic platform.
As reported by CNN, the plan includes manufacturing, clean energy, racial justice in the economy and envisages economic stimulus programmes that would restore jobs lost to coronavirus and add millions more on top of those losses.
His campaign said the plan would cost $775 billion over 10 years, paid for by repealing tax breaks for real estate investors who earn more than $400,000 and “taking steps to increase tax compliance for high-income earners.”
Some $450 billion would go to clearing a waiting list for Medicaid home and community services that, citing Kaiser Family Foundation data, Biden’s campaign said numbers more than 800,000 and can last as long as five years.
Other elements in the proposals include:
Up to $8,000 tax credits for families with one child and $16,000 credits for those with two or more children making up to $125,000 per year. Those earning too much to qualify for the full credit, but less than $400,000 per year, would receive partial credits.
As an alternative to tax credits, families earning up to 1.5 times their state’s median income could instead have their child care subsidised so that they are paying no more than 7 per cent of their income.
Biden added in a town hall on October 15 in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania that $70 billion will be ring-fenced for historically Black colleges and universities.
He also promised to create more fairness in the tax and economic systems to help Black families build more wealth.
