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Postscript II: Trump and the Senate
On March 11, 2021, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act into law.
Postscript II: Trump and the Senate
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It is now May 2021. The dust has settled after the four-day impeachment trial of Donald Trump in the Senate between February 9 and 13, 2021, where 7 Republicans joined all 48 Democratic and 2 independent senators (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine) in voting to convict, which was 10 votes short of the two-thirds, or 67 votes, needed. Thus Trump was acquitted of a single House-enacted impeachment count alleging “Incitement of Insurrection,” based upon the incendiary speech he delivered on January 6, 2021, near the White House, declaring that the presidential election had been stolen by Biden and the Democrats, and urging his thousands of irate followers to march on the Capitol and “stop the steal.” This was followed by hundreds of his armed supporters storming the locked and guarded Capitol, assaulting the Capitol police, wreaking physical havoc therein, and interfering with Congress’s counting of the states’ electoral ballots.
By the time of the impeachment verdict, Joe Biden had been inaugurated as president, and he has passed his first one hundred whirlwind days in office successfully. Donald Trump has returned to his palatial Mar-a-Lago hotel and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, from which he occasionally emerges to pronounce again that “he wuz robbed” in the election and to stir the political pot. However, the dynamics of the Biden presidency and its huge legislative and other initiatives and achievements, as well as Biden’s vigorous vaccine attack on COVID-19, have left large sectors of the public in awe and deeply relieved.
For me at eighty-six, it is especially gratifying to watch because at seventy-eight, Biden is the oldest person ever to be elected and serve as president. I now am a member of what has been called “the
old, old,” and seeing a fellow senior become president while receiving more votes than any other presidential candidate in history seems incredible. One of my many fears about Biden’s candidacy was that he would be the victim of deep-seated ageist prejudice. But ageism seems not to have been a factor in the voting.
In the election, the Biden-Harris ticket garnered more than 81.2 million votes, while Trump-Pence received over 74.2 million. This was the largest turnout in American history despite its having taken place during a pandemic in which, by election day, over 200,000 citizens had died and millions had been afflicted.124
Trump had received 62.9 million votes in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s 65.8 million. He was elected even though Clinton won the popular vote because he prevailed in the Electoral College by a vote of 306 to 232.
It remains a mystery to me how Trump could have received the votes of so many Americans in 2020 when his performance as president was so incredibly deplorable. Political scientists and historians will be trying to answer this question for years. And whether Trump will have a political future remains to be seen. But in the end, the 2020 election result was a vindication of democracy despite its wellknown weaknesses and failures.
Finally, the American political future appears more unpredictable than ever. The extreme Trumpist, nativist, reactionary, and racist turn of the Republican Party would seem to isolate it from future success. However, while Trump was soundly defeated in 2020, the Republicans made gains in the House, although not sufficient to regain the control they had lost in 2018, and they narrowly lost control of the Senate. Further, efforts to limit the franchise of poor and minority voters through restrictive state legislation remains a high Republican priority.
I have been following American politics from childhood, as my
124. By June 2021, the death toll in the U.S. exceeded 600,000.
chapters here make clear. To me, it is not merely an interesting but a critical area that citizens must concern themselves with if they hope to live in a society that produces a greater measure of justice, equality, and fairness and that better fulfills the promise in the Declaration of Independence of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
