On the morning of November 7th, 2020, all major news outlets projected that former-vice president Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States. Despite some controversy over alleged voter-fraud, Biden will likely be elected. 

The longtime Democratic senator received over 79 million votes — the most votes that a presidential candidate has ever received in a United States election. This impressive voter turnout could have been due to an overwhelming concern over Donald Trump’s behavior and his willingness to put his self-image over the well-being of the American people. 

On the other hand, Trump placed second in regard to the most votes ever received in a presidential election. Although this meant that he would still lose the 2020 election’s electoral and popular vote, it is concerning that so many Americans chose Trump over his opponent.

Democracy can be simply defined as a government by the people. To accomplish this, the government should actively listen to what the people have to say. 

While electoral politics are hardly adequate in gathering how the country truly feels due to rampant voter suppression that disproportionately affects marginalized groups, the election’s results show that millions of people chose Trump’s divisiveness, hatred, and falsehoods, and millions of Americans think that he deserves four more years in power. 

Trump has not just been a bad president, but a bad person too. He is a bad president because he disregards or feeds into problems that will affect Americans for generations. He is a bad person because of how incapable he is of being a good role model for his constituents, especially children. 

Multiple women have accused Trump of assault, a few of these accusations including legal action. His racism has been unabashedly apparent, and he once personally called for the death penalty against five innocent Black teens, spending around $85,000 to place ads in local New York City papers that read “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The way he speaks to women and Black people is and always has been demeaning. 

Along with mistreating marginalized people, he allows Americans to believe that lying is permissible, and the past has demonstrated that his lies generally are not followed by consequences directly unto him. Trump has managed to get away with nearly every wrongdoing during his career and presidency. What other politicians, even other Republicans, could never get away with, he has been praised for. 

Unfortunately, this behavior has not ended with the loss that Trump has yet to accept. Over the past few weeks, his tweets have been marked with Twitter’s warning, “This claim about election fraud has been disputed,” and his lawyers are denying claims of fraud. The majority of these allegations have been centered around votes from mail-in ballots generally leaning towards Democrats. 

After an entire election cycle of Trump urging his supporters to vote in-person and Biden encouraging the Democrats to vote by mail, mail-in voters favoring Democratic candidates should not be seen as a statistical anomaly. 

A few of Trump’s lawyers— Rudolph Giuliani and Linda Kerns– have said, “This is not a fraud case” and “I am not proceeding on [allegations of fraud or misconduct].” In response to a judge asking, “Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these disputed ballots,” his lawyer, Jonathan Goldstein, responded, “To my knowledge at present, no.”

On Twitter, while Trump makes baseless claims such as, “This is a case where [the Democrats] are trying to steal an election,” and “There were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting,” his lawyers say explicitly otherwise when they are in a court of law. 

In spite of clear evidence against Trump’s claims, even coming from people that work for him, some of Trump’s supporters decided to prove their loyalty by attending a ‘Million MAGA March’ in Washington DC to protest the alleged fraud, proudly displaying Trump and Confederate flags while shouting overused Trump talking points and standing close together without masks on. 

Before and during this event, Trump’s biggest fans regurgitated a Donald Trump Jr. tweet that read, “70 million pissed off republicans [sic] and not one city burned to the ground,” an indirect dig at Black Lives Matter protests, as if Trump losing was at all comparable to a Black man being choked to death in broad daylight or a Black woman being shot to death in her own home, both by police officers and both receiving no justice.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany posted, “More than one MILLION marchers for President [Donald Trump] descend on Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14.” Yet PolitiFact quickly debunked this, stating, “[it is] mathematically impossible for more than 135,000 people to fit in the location that McEnany referenced in her tweet.”

Trump’s presidency is ending the same way it started– lying about the turnout of events to fuel Trump’s narcissism. 

The fact of the matter, though, is that Trump has lost. No recounts or lawsuits will change that, mostly because the margins in blue swing-states have become too wide. But the damage that his administration has done, whether it be its excruciatingly inept COVID-19 response that has led to the deaths of over 250,000 Americans, or its inability to get Americans through an ongoing recession, or their divisiveness, will be felt for decades to come and is far from over.

Joe Biden, author of the 1994 crime bill that furthered the brutalization and criminalization of Black people in the United States, and Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor with a troubling past that includes withholding evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row and allowing prison labor to thrive in California, will not be a major improvement, but they are an improvement nevertheless. 

What is promising about the Biden/Harris victory is that human decency will return to the White House. It is promising that Biden’s incoming administration has at least semi-comprehensive plans on prominent issues, especially regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout, rather than no plan at all. And although standards are rather low, their administration could be the most progressive, beneficial one that the United States has seen in a long time.

A lame-duck period such as this is also a time to reflect on how disappointing it is to live in a country that relies heavily upon the restoration of liberal leadership as a way out of crisis. This is a crisis in itself and has proven to be a symptom of the breakdown of what we consider free and fair democracy in the United States.

It is not normal, or it should not be normal, for a country that claims to be one of the best in the world to constantly be on a slippery slope of self-destruction, in which people are forced to constantly worry about their livelihood based on who is in power at the time.

It is easy to blame all of our problems on Trump when, in reality, the system that allowed him to come to power in the first place — and the system that allowed over 70 million people to think that his behavior and rhetoric were acceptable — is what is truly to blame.

Fixing our many problems will require work done from the outside in rather than the inside out. Only when we commit ourselves to liberation for all and hold our leaders accountable to the same ideal will we achieve a more perfect Union.