Friday 20 November 2020

How much longer will Trump wait before conceding?

When the recount results came through from Georgia today you would have thought someone in the White House would have got their abacus out and made a quick arithmetical calculation before paying a visit to the Oval Office. Not that anyone in the white House wants to be the one to say to the president, sorry it's all over. But the Georgia recount was pretty definitive. Biden won, Trump lost. You can't go on recounting, the counters will get sore fingers. There are few options left for the president. None of the judges so far have shown any interest in reversing the count in any of the disputed states, and even if one did, it wouldn't make any difference now. Biden has won 306 electoral college votes as opposed to Trump's 232. And he has won 51.1 per cent of the popular vote against Trump's 47.2 per cent. That's a relatively significant gap I would have thought, big enough to make it impossible for the president to continue to insist that he won the election. There is no evidence that some dark force stole the election and handed it to Biden. So how much longer can Trump wait before he finally concedes that he lost and Biden won? The intriguing thing is that even while Trump refuses to acknowledge the reality of the election result, he is rushing ahead with policy decisions to make sure his favourite administration issues are wrapped up before Januay 20. Like for example his order to the acting defence secretary Chris Miller to cut the US troop presence in Afghanistan from 4,500 to 2,500 by January 15. That smacks of a president doing stuff in his final days because he knows they are his final days. He will have other last-minute actions up his sleeve I have no doubt. Let's hope they are not too drastic, like his calling for options to bomb Iran's nuclear installations. Fortunately his advisers, including Chris Miller, opposed such an idea. Well that was a relief. Meanwhile, without an official concession from Trump, Biden and his team are planning ahead in the dark, refused access to intelligence and any form of mutual discussion about the pandemic, the economy or anything ese. At least Kamala Harris is able to help out a little on the intelligence side. She is on the Senate intelligence committee which gets secret briefings. But who knows whether the real secret stuff is being withheld for the moment?

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