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.
For Joe Biden and his team, it is the extent of this enormity that will have to be measured. What it says about an American evil that the former real estate developer managed to capture for his benefit, but which is far beyond him, will have to be understood. The inanity of Trump’s action in the face of the Covid-19 epidemic, for example, should have earned him a major electoral sanction. At least that is what many observers thought, without realizing that under this logical current, going in the direction of Joe Biden, another, not very visible, one was flowing in favor of Donald Trump.
Our recent investigations into radical Facebook groups or the QAnon conspiracy movement have shown that since this summer, the epidemic has sparked an explosion of rumors, fears and accusations, each as false as the last, which have fueled an outpouring of support for the outgoing president from all social classes. These have even earned him excellent scores in the very large majority of the counties that suffered the most from the disease.
That is the whole problem, of which social networks are only the amplifiers: for false news to have an impact, for manipulation to work, groups of people must have reason to believe in it. Trumpism is the symptom, not the cause, of these multiple resentments, these feelings of injustice, these despairs, these fears, this selfishness too, which feed the gullibility of the crowds.
Joe Biden will have to tackle this issue if he is serious about restoring a country that is deeply torn apart, riddled with racism, a failing infrastructure, an unequal educational system, declining life expectancy, and wealth increasingly concentrated in a few hands. As these evils do not exclusively affect the United States, far from it, just as they can manufacture other despots of the Trumpian type in other democracies, we must wish Joe Biden a fruitful tenure. It is to be hoped that the 46th president of this great nation will succeed in giving the relief felt today the form of hope.
