It’s not 2000 anymore: President Trump’s rejection of election sets rocky landscape for President-elect Biden
united court refused to take action, rejecting a lawsuit by Texas aimed at throwing out the election results in four battleground states.
With that, efforts to deny Joe Biden’s election were essentially vanquished. Monday, electors meeting in state capitols are poised to affirm that.
But in this case, unlike two decades ago, the losing candidate and his supporters vow defiance rather than acceptance. Pro-Trump protesters marched on the streets of Washington Saturday, chanting, “Four more years!” One GOP official suggested more drastic action.
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The refusal to acknowledge the election’s outcome will create additional hurdles for Biden when he is inaugurated Jan. 20, already a president assuming office at a time of crises. Besides a pandemic and a roiled economy, Biden will have to deal with this: One-third of Americans in a new Quinnipiac University poll say he didn’t legitimately win the Oval Office, including a stunning 70% of Republicans.
conservative legal scholars called it an outlandish effort to overturn a democratic election because the litigants didn’t like the outcome.
The Democratic majority in the House has been cut to single digits, so those are legislators whose support the Biden administration may well need.
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That isn’t to say the 2000 election was a golden moment of national comity. Disgruntled Democrats noted that George W. Bush’s father had appointed two of the Supreme Court justices who ruled on his son’s case and that his brother happened to be governor of Florida, the state in dispute. Al Gore indisputably carried the popular vote.
Even so, 80% of Americans, including 61% of Gore supporters, said in a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken the day after the court decision that they would accept Bush as the legitimate president.
Hours after that decisive Supreme Court ruling, Gore conceded the election. “I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country,” he said.
That was not Trump’s reaction to this year’s court decision. He cheered on the protesters gathered a few blocks from the White House. “Wow!” he tweeted. “Thousands of people forming in Washington (D.C.) for Stop the Steal.”
His supporters waved American flags and Trump campaign banners. “There are still avenues,” Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was pardoned by Trump last month after he admitted lying to the FBI, assured the crowd. “We’re fighting with faith and we’re fighting with courage.”
Instead of planning to attend his successor’s inauguration, as is traditional, Trump discussed the possibility of holding a campaign-style rally on the day Biden takes the oath of office, NBC News reported. That bit of political counterprogramming could mark the launch of his 2024 campaign.
Trump’s lawsuits challenging election results and Biden’s win