Meanwhile Donald Trump may be on his way out but his Republican Party will live on and haunt the Democrat Party

6 min readNov 11, 2020

President-elect Joe Biden fielded calls from foreign leaders who offered their congratulations on his projected victory in the presidential election, an acknowledgement that key U.S. allies are preparing for a new administration even as President Trump refuses to concede defeat.

The Biden transition office said the president-elect on Tuesday spoke to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin. Mr. Biden spoke to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday.

“I’m letting them know that America is back. We’re going to be back in the game,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday in Delaware, taking questions for the first time as president-elect after delivering remarks on health care.

Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are forging ahead with the transition to the White House with 71 days until Inauguration Day, despite the Trump administration’s refusal to take the formal steps necessary to ensure a smooth transfer of power.

Under the law, the Biden-Harris transition teams cannot start formal meetings with current officials across the government or access secure facilities to work with classified information before the head of the little-known General Services Administration (GSA) determines that the pair are likely the next president and vice president. The GSA administrator has declined to make that determination.

“We believe that the time has come for the GSA administrator to promptly ascertain Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect,” an unidentified Biden-Harris transition official said Monday night on a telephone briefing with reporters, adding that the transition could pursue legal options if the administration continues to stall.

One consequence of the GSA’s unwillingness to “ascertain” a winner is that the congratulatory phone calls Biden is receiving from world leaders are happening without the help of the State Department, according to a transition official.

Mr. Biden himself said the delay in formally recognizing the presidential outcome is “not of much consequence.”

“We’re already beginning the transition. We’re well underway,” Mr. Biden said. But he also called Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede “an embarrassment” and suggested that “it will not help the president’s legacy.”

Mr. Trump has refused to concede the election since Mr. Biden was projected to be the winner on Saturday, and his campaign is pursuing lawsuits in a handful of states challenging the results. The campaign has not produced evidence of widespread voter fraud on a scale that would change the election results.

It’s crazy political times like these that I long for how quickly, simply and peacefully the 1980 presidential election ended.

That was the year President Jimmy Carter called my father at 5 in the afternoon of Election Day — while he was in the shower — and congratulated him on winning the presidency.

Votes were still being counted and probably half the country hadn’t voted yet, but by early evening Carter already knew he was being swept out of office by the Ronald Reagan landslide.

On Tuesday, Democrats were expecting to see a repeat of 1980.

They thought President Trump would be so far behind by dinner time that he’d have to call Joe Biden and concede.

For months they and the country’s inept pollsters, blind pundits and dishonest journalists had convinced themselves that a mighty Blue Wave was coming.

A Biden Blowout was going to sweep away Donald Trump, half a dozen senators like Lindsay Graham and dozens of Republican House members and put Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress and the White House.

But their Great Blue Wave turned out to be a Blue Mirage.

It looks like after a few weeks of legal challenges and a recount or two, Joe Biden is going to win, which would be a huge and impressive victory for the Democrats.

But otherwise, Election 2020 has been a political disaster for their party.

Democrats lost at least six seats in the House and legislative majorities in several states. But most important, they didn’t come close to taking over the Senate.

That wrecked the dangerous pipedreams of the party’s old and young socialists to get rid of the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court.

Ditto for Joe Biden’s promises to implement the Green New Deal, destroy our energy industry and punish the rich by jacking up taxes on incomes, capital gains and corporations.

In four years Trump has single-handedly enlarged, energized and diversified the old GOP, turning it into an energized America-first movement for millions of everyday citizens.

And though he was unfairly called a racist and a white supremacist by Democrats and the media every day for almost five years, he shocked the Democrats and impressed the liberal media this week by capturing a historic number of black, Latino and Jewish votes.

Based on early exit polls, Trump won 26 percent of non-white voters. For a Republican, that’s huge.

Instead of 8 percent he won 12 percent of the black vote — 18 percent of black men and 8 percent of black women. More impressive, he won 32 percent of the Hispanic vote — 36 percent of Hispanic men.

President Trump was on his way to doing what many of us in the Republican Party knew we needed to do decades ago.

During the Bush II years, when I spoke to a few hundred fellow Republicans during a breakfast meeting in Florida, I told them the party had been more diverse when my father was president.

I said we needed to reach out to minorities. To prove my point, I said, “Will all the blacks and Hispanics eating breakfast with us this morning please stand up.”

They all looked around at each other. No one stood. The only blacks and Hispanics in the room were serving breakfast, not eating it.

I told those Republicans that if the Party of Reagan was to survive it had to reach out to blacks and Hispanics every single year, not every two years or four years, but no one really listened until an outsider named Donald Trump came along.

President Trump’s days may be numbered. But whether you are a Republican who loved him or hated him, you should give him the credit he is due.

He’s shown Republicans the roadmap to the black, Hispanic and Jewish voter. If we hope to take back the House, keep the Senate and win the White House in the future, we need to follow that map.
Self-styled militias are seeking to play a role in U.S. politics in a way that hasn’t been seen in decades. Of diverse origins, such groups have capitalized on the social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matters and police reform protests. Right-wing extremist groups have intensified their recruitment, opposed lockdowns, and promised to protect businesses from looting or help them not comply with COVID-19 regulations. What impact have these groups had on the U.S. election and post-election period so far, and on rule of law and democracy in the United States more broadly? What are their origins? How do they compare to and interact with extremist groups elsewhere in the world? What policies should the next U.S. administration adopt to respond to the challenges they pose?

On November 10, Foreign Policy at Brookings held a panel discussion to examine these questions and more. Brookings President John R. Allen introduced the event and moderated the panel discussion, which featured Mary McCord, legal director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and visiting professor of law at Georgetown University; Rashawn Ray, David M. Rubenstein fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings; Daniel Byman, senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Upon the conclusion of their remarks, panelists took questions from the audience.

Meanwhile Donald Trump may be on his way out but his Republican Party will live on and haunt the Democrat Party

Written by rokie hasan