can Joe Biden turn relief into hope ?

Editorial of « Le Monde ». Good news has been too rare in 2020 to allow us to qualify it : the Democratic candidate Joe Biden has defeated the incumbent President Donald Trump in the final outcome of the US presidential election. Once the recounts have been completed, once his rival’s appeals have been dealt with – this will be a long and painful process – he will take office on 20 January in the White House, with a legitimacy based not only on the votes of the Electoral College, but also on popular vote. In fact, thanks to a historic jump in participation, although he will not have won all the victories in the States that the polls promised him, he will enter the Oval Office after capturing the largest number of votes in the country’s history, around 75 million.

However, the biggest mistake would be to settle for that sigh of relief. At the end of four years of a devastating mandate, a few months of a degrading campaign and days, or weeks, of appalling legal-political guerrilla warfare, the democrat President-elect will end up advancing into the field of ruins abandoned by his predecessor, with the immense task of rebuilding everything, or almost everything.

In order to have a chance to do so, first of all, he will have to remain calm. This is not the most widespread faculty of our time, but Joe Biden is far from being devoid of it, as he has demonstrated in these days of great tension over the latest results. He has remained impassive when confronted with groups of fanatics, not many in number, who may still exaggerate the risk of civil clashes for some time to come. He has remained unshakeable in the face of assaults by lawyers who will try to make people believe in the irregularity of ballot papers that are undoubtedly legal. And, above all, he has not been distracted by the frenzy of false and manipulative tweeting that the incumbent president is issuing in a continuous stream from the White House.

A black hole of egocentricity

Anything but unpredictable, Donald Trump will undoubtedly continue until the last day of his presidency, and long afterwards, to behave like a black hole of egocentricity that would rather swallow up democracy, the entire country, and the planet with it, rather than admit defeat or wrong. In his post-ballot statements, this violence against institutions and truth went so far that it made the following rapprochement very embarrassing : with more than 70 million votes, the defeated president obtained slightly more than Barack Obama’s score in his 2008 victory. He also becomes the Republican candidate who will have collected the most votes in history, proof that in the election that is coming to an end, there will not have been one wave, as announced, but two, the blue one fortunately higher than the red one.

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