The Daily Orange is a nonprofit newsroom that receives no funding from Syracuse University. Consider donating today to support our mission.

Former Vice President and Syracuse University alumnus Joe Biden emerged victorious on Saturday, ending an election cycle that saw record-breaking voter turnout and equally remarkable partisan divisions. President Donald Trump has refused to accept defeat.

The president’s reaction to losing has been consistent with what he has always said he would do. He was very transparent in 2016 about being prepared to reject the results of the election, should he lose.

And so he has. He came out in the early hours of Nov. 4 to declare he’s “going to the Supreme Court,” and he was very forthcoming about his desire to negate the votes of millions of Americans. Since then, he’s indicated that he has no intention of vacating the people’s house on Inauguration Day.

Trump has stolen a lot of things in life, but he will not steal this election. The president and this Republican Party will be cemented in American history books as losers, and sore ones at that. Trump’s reaction was predictable, but the reaction of GOP bigwigs has been shocking. Their obsequiousness never fails to amaze.

The Republican Party knew suppression, denial and court battles were their only path forward. This should alarm every American, regardless of party affiliation. Don’t fear that they will succeed in stealing this election —  they won’t. Instead, reflect on the woeful state of our nation, wherein leaders of one of our two major political parties engage in a campaign of deceit to sow distrust in the results of a presidential election because their guy lost.

Republicans in Congress should realize that this is their chance to bail out from the Trump train before it crashes into a wall of its own making. Republicans have retained control of the Senate, at least until the Georgia runoffs, and have also won gains in the House of Representatives. While the GOP is celebrating its down-ballot victories, they simultaneously are rejecting the presidential results.

Votes for the Republicans are legal, while votes for Democrats are fraudulent, at least according to leaders such as Sen. Mitch McConnell, who recently refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory.

The Republican leadership can see the obvious hypocrisy in this. But they just don’t care. Their same approach succeeded in shoving Amy Coney Barrett into the Supreme Court just days before the election. Brazen disdain for the American people and the systems we cherish isn’t pretty, but evidently, it gets the job done.

At the same time, Trump supporters have crawled out of the woodwork to spew their own vile hatred. The president’s language has emboldened former campaign manager Steve Bannon to say on Thursday that the first step of Trump’s nonexistent second term should be to behead Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. After the comment, Twitter banned Bannon, and his personal attorney dropped him as a client.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, infamous for his refusal to compromise, asked Attorney General William Barr to send federal agents into Pennsylvania to arrest poll workers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo smiled as he shamelessly said there will be a peaceful transition into a second Trump administration.

Barr put forth an order on Monday allowing prosecutors at the Department of Justice to move forward with voter fraud investigations, breaking with the department’s traditions of refraining from conducting voter fraud investigations before and during elections. Within hours of receiving the order, Richard Pilger, the director of the department’s election crimes branch, notified colleagues that he was stepping down from the watchdog post and transferring departments.

It’s not just high ranking Republicans that have joined in Trump’s attempt to steal the election. In Arizona, where Trump is losing, supporters chant “Stop the steal!,” and identical crowds in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia chant “stop the count.” Anyone confident that they won an election would be fighting for every vote to be counted, instead of fighting to take away the rights of their fellow Americans.

Regardless of their personal motives, the fact that a sitting U.S. president and his mob of millions are so transparently opposed to our democratic process is tragic.

It should come as no surprise that the cities facing the brunt of Trump’s legal offensive — most notably Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta — are primarily Black and overwhelmingly Democratic. Republicans are terrified of people voting because, when people vote, Republicans lose.

How much larger would our record-breaking voter turnout have been if the party that controlled most of our federal government hadn’t directed the sum of its powers toward blocking Americans from voting?

At the end of the day, Americans saw through the GOP efforts to muzzle the voice of the people, and they see now the paper tiger of Trump’s legal team. Biden has roughly 4.7 million more votes than Trump, a lead that will likely expand as the remaining states report their final votes. I’m proud that my country united to oppose fascism, but Trump’s popular vote count of approximately 71.6 million demonstrates that the election was merely a victorious battle in a war that can continue into Biden’s administration.

But the biggest takeaway from the 2020 presidential election is this: American morality is not as bankrupt as the president’s.

Patrick McCarthy is a graduate student in the magazine, online and digital journalism program. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at pmcca100@syr.edu. He can be followed on Twitter at @pmcopinion.

Published on November 11, 2020 at 12:08 am