Trump has been toppled: The strangest presidency in American history is almost over
Lesson summary
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff, welcome to Plain English, your top resource for learning English with current events. And what an event we have today: the American election was officially called just about a week ago. JR, our producer, has posted this full lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/312.
On today’s lesson, it was a wild ride, but the 2020 American presidential campaign has finally been decided and Democrat Joe Biden has unseated Donald Trump. I’ll take you step by step through the big news of election week in America, and we’ll revisit some of these topics in future weeks. The expression on today’s program is “tread carefully”; listen for that and see if you can guess its meaning. Here we go!
Trump toppled
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., a former Senator and vice president, and a fixture of American politics for almost five decades, won the 2020 presidential election and will be the nation’s 46th president in January next year, 32 years after he first ran for the White House. His victory cuts short the bizarre and precedent-breaking presidency of Donald Trump, a former reality television star who shocked the world with an upset victory in 2016. Biden, who will soon turn 78, will be the oldest person ever to assume the presidency and only the second Catholic to hold the post. Trump is the first sitting president to lose re-election this century.
Kamala Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants and Biden’s running mate, will become the highest-ranking female politician in American history and will be first in the line of presidential succession. Prior to this campaign, she had been a U.S. Senator from California, Attorney General of the state of California and a prosecutor in San Francisco.
Biden’s victory caps a roller-coaster campaign that took place amid a global pandemic, protests in the streets, the death of a Supreme Court justice, and finally the illness of the sitting president, who came down with the very disease whose severity he had been downplaying for months. After being hospitalized for COVID-19 in early October, Trump came roaring back onto the campaign trail, hosting raucous rallies and fighting until the end.
It was almost enough. For most of election night itself, it appeared the ghost of 2016 might once again haunt the Democrats, as it became clear that Donald Trump was outperforming expectations. He won two big states early in the night, Ohio and Florida, the latter chock-full of Hispanic voters and the elderly, both of which were expected to deliver for Biden. As the vote count continued on election night, it was not clear who would be president, but there were two big losers: the polling industry, which had confidently predicted a Biden landslide, and the news media, which had once again failed to capture the strength of Trump’s support in its pre-election reporting.
What was supposed to be an early and decisive win for Biden turned into a nail-biter. Television news and web sites display the results as they come in: individual counties send batches of results to a media consortium throughout the night and, if necessary, the following days. Media outlets tally the votes and track candidates’ victories by state, which is how the official vote is decided. Most Americans went to bed on Tuesday night thinking Donald Trump—somehow—had a chance to pull off another monumental upset, as he was shown to be leading in just enough critical states to win again. But a quirk of 2020 is that more Americans than ever before voted by mail, and many mail-in votes were not counted on Election Night itself.
Because Trump spent months disparaging mail-in votes, most of his voters were counted early, while many Biden voters were counted later. Trump’s apparent lead evaporated in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, three large states that were expected to decide the election. When Americans woke up on Wednesday, it was Biden who appeared to be leading by a vanishingly thin margin in just enough states to win. His advantage continued to expand through the rest of the week, as more mail-in votes were tabulated. By the Saturday after Election Day, enough votes had been counted in enough states to decisively say that Biden would win the election.
Finally, the 74 million Americans who voted for Biden—not to mention a multiple of that number in other countries—could exhale: Donald Trump, who had governed so erratically (often by tweet), broken so many norms, undermined so many institutions, and offended so many people, had officially been toppled. The rest of the world looked with mouths agape at America when it selected the oft-bankrupt casino mogul-turned-reality television star as its leader in 2016; after four tumultuous years, the global community could now look forward to a return to normality. The mayor of Paris, speaking for much of the rest of the world, tweeted, “Welcome back, America” minutes after Biden’s victory was announced.
American Democrats, however, cannot afford to celebrate for long. For while their man did win the presidency with 50.5 percent of the vote, the result was not the stinging rebuke of Trump they had been hoping for. Biden won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, surpassing the previous record-holder, Barack Obama, by some four million votes. But the second-highest vote total in American history went to Donald Trump right here in 2020; despite his loss, he won seven million more votes this year than he won in 2016, signaling that the divisions in our country run deep.
A further difficulty for Democrats was down-ballot, where they underperformed expectations. Democrats had been expected to take command of both houses of our legislature, giving Biden a mandate for sweeping change. Instead, voters cut the Democrats’ majority in the House of Representatives by at least five seats and vulnerable Republicans held onto their Senate seats in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Maine. Final control of the Senate will be determined by two special elections in January, but it appears that Biden will have to contend with a legislature at least partially controlled by the other party.
Voters put a scare even into many Democrats who were re-elected. Biden himself has always governed as a middle-of-the-road Democrat, but the restless left wing of his party often championed ideas that were well outside the mainstream of public opinion. Many Democratic lawmakers in moderate, suburban districts expressed frustration that they were frequently tied to their party’s most radical ideas. One furious Democratic lawmaker, who almost lost re-election, said she didn’t want to hear the left-wing slogan “defund the police” ever again because it almost cost her her seat.
Biden will therefore have to negotiate competing priorities: the base of Democratic supporters is hungry to see its progressive agenda passed; moderate Democrats, with an eye on this year’s close call, will want to tread more carefully; and for any law to pass, it will need at least partial support from the opposition party in the Senate.
Biden may be the perfect person to negotiate these different priorities. He is a classic Washington deal-making politician: he was the chief negotiator with Congress during the Obama presidency and has decades of experience working with members of Congress. The leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, was the only Senator to attend the funeral of Biden’s son. The two have a good personal and professional relationship. One media outlet said that Washington’s new power couple would be Mitch and Joe.
But if this pair of septuagenarians is Washington’s new power couple, one will have decidedly more power than the other. And for all the Democrats’ complaints that they didn’t win as many legislative seats as they wanted, they did win the biggest prize. The American presidency may be checked in important ways, but it is still a powerful office. Much of the machinery of government sits in the executive branch, and Biden will have a free hand to make important domestic changes and reset America’s course abroad. At his age, he will almost definitely be a single-term president; this may give him the freedom to be bolder in his reforms and to seek more unconventional compromises than other first-term presidents have been.
Big news around the world
I have always known that American presidential elections are big news abroad, but I must say I was a little surprised by exactly how big this news was in other countries. I’ve purposely tried not to spend too much time on American politics. But it is big news, so over the next few weeks, we’ll do one lesson a week on the election and its implications for the future. We’ll save the other lesson for lighter topics.
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