By The Viewpoints Editorial Board
The United States has been lucky enough that every transition of power since the nation’s first in 1797 has been peaceful.
Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the nation’s 46th president on Jan. 20, 2021. President Donald Trump and the Republican party must concede their loss peacefully.
Trump is attempting to bypass the voice of the nation and creating a crisis among millions of Americans who have listened to his false claims.
The Trump Administration has filed dozens of lawsuits claiming fraudulence in the 2020 Election. These lawsuits must be seen for what they are: nothing more than an attempt to undermine democracy. This behavior stems from Trump’s inability to accept defeat — he did the same when he lost the 2016 Iowa Caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani attempted to force election officials to stop counting ballots and certify election results in numerous areas of Pennsylvania. They have done the same in Michigan. In Georgia, they attempted to have 53 ballots disqualified.
Fortunately for the country, over 30 of the lawsuits have been thrown out due to lack of evidence of fraud that the Trump Administration claims took place. At first, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised a “smooth transition to a second Trump Administration,” but many prominent conservatives are reluctantly realizing it’s over.
Republican Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has staunchly supported the president, concisely summed up the situation during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“Elections have consequences and we cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen,” Christie said Nov. 22.
The president’s unsubstantiated claims have destabilized faith in our electoral process to the point where millions of Americans are turning against the network that has provided them a safe space for decades.
Fox News personality Laura Ingraham walked on eggshells when she finally vocalized reality during “The Ingraham Angle” on Nov. 23, assuring viewers that her take did not “constitute being a sellout to the conservative populist movement.” She chose her words carefully due to the backlash the network has received for their election coverage.
Trump may have at one point symbolized a glimmer of hope for a certain demographic — the poor, White, Christian voters who before 2015 felt abandoned by two parties who shifted their pandering to the increasingly diverse sector. He reached out to dying coal mining towns in West Virginia, to religious grandmothers who simply wanted to see abortion abolished, and to all who felt they were being forgotten in a country that used to belong solely to them.
He managed to attract increasingly diverse voters as his term went on. But in the end, his actions as president resulted in his rejection by the majority. That is all there is to it.
Those unwilling to accept the outcome of the election should recognize that they have been subjected to conditioning for months. Trump began preparing his voters for this tantrum as soon as talks of increasing mail-in voting began due to COVID-19 earlier this year. He influenced his supporters, many of whom disregard pandemic safety guidance, against voting by mail.
Consequently, Democrats, who are more likely to abide by pandemic safety guidance, were more likely to vote by mail. Joe Biden’s surge in votes once absentee ballots were counted was not an inexplicable phenomenon. It was actually rather predictable.
Even as the General Services Administration acknowledged the beginning of the formal transitioning process, the president continues to golf, skip meetings and deny his loss. In doing so, he cements his legacy.
The American public must move on from the childish antics of the 2020 Election. The arguments to be had are about the policy decisions that await us in the next four years.
