The desperate, deceitful, dastardly demagogue who currently occupies the White House ranted rabidly for 16 minutes Thursday, from the same podium real presidents once used, about how a fair and free election, the will of the people patiently and legally expressed, might remove him from power.
Without a grain of evidence, he called the election “stolen.” He said, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win.” In his deranged brain, votes for him are legal; votes against, illegitimate.
This is what it looks like when a leader tries to subvert an election. This is what it looks like when a dictatorial character infects the United States presidency. This should disgust and outrage every American, regardless of party.
While Trump seeks to set the democracy on fire with obscene, unfounded, unrepeatable lies, officials diligently tallied votes legally cast and received, and by the hour and day his margin shrunk in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Mail-in votes are the last to be counted, in part because Republicans refused to let states do any advance processing, and they skew heavily Democratic in these states. So Trump’s leads there are rightly diminishing.
Meantime, Trump and his minions demand that vote counts continue or even accelerate in Arizona and Nevada, states where he’s behind and Joe Biden’s margin could shrink. Either he doesn’t realize or he doesn’t care that one primal scream refutes the other.
Nor does he care that the Republican House and Senate victories he celebrates disprove his incomprehensible whine about a vast left-wing conspiracy to remove him.
There is one and only one way for a democratic republic like ours to proceed at a moment like this: to count every valid vote. Which is what Democratic and Republican officials are doing.
The legal wrenches the president’s attorneys are frantically throwing in the gears are immaterial. The only legal question of any moment could emerge in Pennsylvania, in the potential event that state proves decisive. If the margin there is ultra-close in Biden’s favor, and if late-arriving mail ballots proved to be the difference, then Trump may try to get the Supreme Court to invalidate those ballots.
But even if those ifs line up, the high court will have to reckon with the fact that it deadlocked 4-4 on the question before the election, leaving Pennsylvanians with the clear direction that votes they mailed at the 11th hour would be counted, even if they arrived up to three days late.
Ignore the tyrant’s tantrum. Count every valid vote. If he loses as he is on track to, drag him screaming out of the hallowed White House. Cuff him if we must.
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
