Let’s be real now, we all knew that if Joe Biden won the United States election, Donald Trump wasn’t going to concede.
He wasn’t going to leave the White House with dignity, he wasn’t going to congratulate Biden on his success. He was always going to whinge, call the election rigged and basically act like a big orange baby.
It’s been one day since Biden declared victory in the election (finally) and he’s promised to move quickly to coordinate a response to the growing coronavirus pandemic (which hit 50 million cases worldwide today, the US has hit the highest daily number of new cases since the pandemic began). A response Trump still hasn’t properly achieved since America’s first COVID-19 case in January. Apologies, his response was just reassuring people it would “disappear”.
To be honest, I don’t think we’re even close to seeing the end of Trump. For starters, since he only completed one term as President of the United States, he is still eligible to run again in 2024. There is nothing in the Constitution that states the President has to do their two possible terms in order.
The 22nd Amendment of the Constitution states only that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” but does not stipulate that those two terms must be held consecutively.
Trump’s onetime aide Steve Bannon told The Australian last month that if the President loses in the 2020 election, he will likely run again.
“I’ll make this prediction right now: If for any reason the election is stolen from or in some sort of way Joe Biden is declared the winner, Trump will announce he’s going to run for re-election in 2024,” he said.
“You’re not going to see the end of Donald Trump.”
He did also call for acting Government Officials to be murdered but we’ll leave that for another day.
While Trump may not be in the business of conceding, we’ll have to give him this one. Not only have we not seen the last of Trump, we certainly haven’t seen the last of his supporters.
Despite Biden winning the overall electoral vote, Trump still received a whopping 70.8 million votes. More Americans voted for Biden than Trump by a margin of more than 4 million votes. Meaning America is extremely divided and the radical beliefs many of his supporters have won’t just change because they have a new President.
Brendon O’Connor, an associate professor in American politics at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre spoke to SBS News before the election result:
“There’s clearly a lot of people in America who feel financially vulnerable. That’s not going to change overnight and certainly not in a COVID-created sort of recession,” Associate Professor O’Connor said.
“There’ll be plenty of people who have a sense that politics and the economy haven’t served them particularly well.”
Trump supporters who are against immigration, believe minorities get better treatment, and that white people are losing their status, aren’t likely to change their mind soon either, Associate Professor O’Connor said.
“This kind of status entitlement is really the current thing being whipped up by Trump.”
And of course, there’s no taking away Trump’s Twitter. As much as the social media giant tries to warn readers and fact check, Trump will still be flooding into our feeds.
Just today Trump has tweeted 11 times with seven of those tweets disputed by Twitter linking readers to sources explaining why voting by mail is safe and secure:
“If Trump is alive and well, it’s hard to imagine him maintaining a low profile,” Brandice Canes-Wrone, a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University told The New York Times.
“And, even without Trump, there are likely GOP [Grand Old Party which is another term for the Republican Party] presidential candidates popular with this wing of the party.”
Fingers crossed the Republican Party doesn’t want him back again in 2024, and now we just have to wait until moving day. That’s if Trump actually does leave the White House voluntarily.
The US constitution says “the terms of the president and vice president shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of their successors should then begin”, but makes no mention of what to do if the outgoing president won’t leave.
Hopefully after the legal battles Trump’s been threatening get laughed out of court, he will have no choice but admit defeat, pack up his toupees and Maybelline Mousse Foundation and head back to Trump Tower.
Then again, he still thinks he should have won that Emmy.
Image: Spencer Platt / Staff and Tom Pennington Staff via Getty Images