North Texas Daily

After a long and stressful week, major news outlets declared former Vice President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The decision came after CNN projected that Biden had won the state of Pennsylvania, granting him 20 electoral votes and pushing him over the mandatory 270. Biden’s supporters celebrated the loss of incumbent President Donald Trump to streets around the U.S. from Atlanta to Washington D.C. As for the president, he and his legal team have decided to take the election to court.

Trump came out to supporters, criticizing the election process and calling it “rigged.” Trump also had the nerve to falsely declare himself as the winner of the election and demanded that ballots stop being counted. Mind you, many of these states were 76 to 80 percent through with the count and millions of mail-in ballots had still been uncounted for. Trump attempted to suppress the democracy of the American people while Biden remained adamant that every ballot be counted. Luckily, states followed through with the count and ignored Trump’s incredulous demands.

The race was close, but Biden won by a convincing margin. In fact, since he won Georgia and Arizona, he wins with the same amount of electoral votes Trump had in 2016. In Trump’s vocabulary, that would be a landslide.

Despite major news outlets giving him the benefit of the doubt to call the election when it was down to the wire, Trump is doing the only thing he knows: sue his way out of a corner. More than a year before the election, Trump deemed the election system in states like California. In his mind, he cannot be defeated because no one can fathom a better candidate than him in office.

Former New York City Mayor and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has said his client has a strong case in the state of Pennsylvania. He claimed it was impossible for Biden to surpass Trump’s lead of 196,000. He also said courts decide elections, not news networks. He’s right in that networks do not decide who the winner is – they gather data from polling centers and report to the people who have won based on meticulous calculations.

He’s mistaken about courts deciding who the president will be. It is citizens who make the decision and over 74 million Americans decided against another Trump term. Giuliani’s fabulous knowledge of the law should also be called into question. USA Today has contacted nine separate legal experts and all have stated the same: the case is dead on arrival. Trump’s legal team have yet to provide evidence of voter fraud that isn’t founded upon fraudulent claims and bruised egos.

The truth is Trump’s lead during election night was due to the counting of in-person voting, which news outlets count first. Mail-in ballots could not be opened until the day of the election and poll centers were completely overwhelmed by the number, stretching into the millions. Trump developed a significant lead on election night because most of his supporters followed his words of encouragement to vote in-person. He persuaded them that mail-in ballots are a scam even though the military has been using this system of voting since the Civil War.

On the other side, Biden encouraged voters to vote by mail-in ballot which led to a high turnout that heavily favored the Democratic candidate. Trump hit the panic button and attempted to illegally silence the voices of millions of Americans when he demanded the count be stopped. States didn’t follow through with this because there was nothing illegal about voting. It’s actually a very legal right that can be found in the Constitution if Trump and his team look hard enough.

Infamously, Trump has refused to concede the election even though President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have provided victory speeches and world leaders have acknowledged their victory on social media. Forget the time-honored tradition of a concession speech: because of Trump’s accusations, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy has refused to sign off on a letter of ascertainment, stalling the transfer of power process for Biden. This means Biden’s transition team cannot move into government offices or access classified information.

Trump’s decision to take the election to court is a move that embarrasses the essence of democracy. It’s not as if this is the Bush v. Gore case where the election was decided by one state that was too close to call. Trump needed a combination of three out of five battleground states and Pennsylvania to win the election, while Biden needed a combination of two or Pennsylvania alone. Even the president’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner along with the First Lady Melania Trump have asked the president to concede, according to a source from CNN.

Trump’s lawsuit will go down as one of the biggest fails because it is a narcissist’s juvenile attack on democracy. It wasn’t the blowout Democrats had expected but it is one Republicans need to accept. As for Trump, you are an impeached, one-term, twice-popular-vote-losing president. It’s time to accept your place in history. Stop being a Karen, man up and accept the decision of the American people. You’re fired.

Featured Illustration by J. Robynn Aviles