Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1307485
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 8 NOVEMBER 2020 Raphael Vassallo OPINION It was always about 'getting rid of Trump', never about electing Biden… OK, let's get a few obvious things out of the way first. I'm writing this on a Friday, and – remark- ably, when you consider that the counting started last Tuesday – we still don't know who actually won the American election. And what's more: at the precise time of writing, we might not even have a final answer before Mon- day. But that's only if there are no more legal recourses to 'stop the count' in certain states; and also, if there are no official recounts later (of the kind that, in 2000, ended up by delaying the official result by over a month). Meanwhile, the latest reports are that Joe Biden is close to 'flip- ping' Georgia… and no, that's not a euphemism for another 'f' word that ends with an 'ing': apparent- ly, it's just the Americans' way of saying "he might win back a state that has always voted Republican in the recent past". And because of the sheer intri- cacies of the American electoral system (and there we all were, thinking ours was complicated…) that, alone, would almost certain- ly be enough to land Joe Biden in the White House. The bottom line, then, is that Biden might be declared the 46th President of the United States by the time I finish writing this ar- ticle… …or we might have to wait a while longer (maybe a few days, maybe until around Christmas)… Or, who knows? There is still a possibility – albeit microscop- ic, and shrinking rather rapidly – that yet another turnaround in the counting process might propel Donald Trump back in- to the lead… not to mention a distinct likelihood that he might just not accept defeat at all… or, conversely, that Democrat voters would similarly reject the (now extremely unlikely) scenario of a last-minute Trump upset, against the run of the play… Indeed, there are so many pos- sibilities (including some rather unpleasant ones) that the actual counting process, up to a point, hardly seems to matter anymore. On the basis of what we know so far: we can all easily predict an eventual Biden victory… but at the same time… um… we can't. For make no mistake: USA 2020 has been unlike any other US election I have ever followed in the past. Not so much because of its sheer unpredictability, in terms of winners and losers alone (the 2000 election, as I recall, was actually much worse); nor even because there is, quite frankly, so much riding on a change in American government right now (the same could be said for Ba- rack Obama's victory in 2008… and also, depending on your po- litical views and biases, for pretty much any other election, at any other time). No, it's because this particu- lar contest seems to also direct- ly challenge some of the most fundamental principles of de- mocracy itself. That possibility I mentioned earlier, that Donald Trump might conceivably refuse to step down if he loses? It had always existed, in every previous election – not just in the USA, of course, but everywhere else in the democratic world: indeed, the whole point of democracy, from the very outset, was precisely to avoid such a thing from ever tak- ing place at all. But, while several Europe- an countries have indeed gone through that process (some might include Malta, on the basis of the 1981 election result)… nev- er, in the context of US politics, have I seen it so close to actually becoming reality. Trump's repeated claims of 'electoral fraud', for instance – which started, almost as a pre-emptive Twitter strike, long before the counting had even be- gun – seem, at a glance, to be part of a well-rehearsed strategy to de-legitimize the election result, before it is even announced. And even if there is no coherent 'plan', currently in place, to actu- ally subvert the outcome on that basis: to the millions of die-hard Trump supporters out there – who have already seen their can- didate's early lead disintegrate into almost certain defeat, in the space of a couple of days – those claims will surely be enough to instil deep-seated suspicions: not just about 'who won this particu- lar election'… but also about the democratic system as a whole. Meanwhile – much as I am per- sonally against the use of hack- neyed stereotypes to describe 'Rednecks' and 'Hicks', myself – but… quite a few of those people have guns, you know. And the reason they're allowed to possess firearms to begin with, is that their own Constitution (1776, and all that) actually grants them the legal right to violently over- throw their own government, if they feel it is oppressing them…. Not to be a harbinger of doom, or anything; but add those two observations together (and throw in the possibility of analogous Democrat 'rebellion', if the shoe were on the other foot), and… I don't know. Looks a whole lot like the recipe for a second American Civil War, if you ask me… But let's not run too far ahead of ourselves. Apart from the sheer propensity for violence (another thing which has always existed in the past, but never been felt quite so palpably before)… USA 2020, to mind, also offers a front-seat view of the ultimate end of any two-party democratic system, in any country (including, I need hardly add, our own). One image, in particular, seems to capture the entire panorama in a single frame. It's a cartoon (originally in The New Yorker, I think) in which the Statue of Lib- erty is about to literally launch Donald Trump into orbit… or, preferably, out of existence al- together… using a medical face- mask as a catapult. Not, mind you, that I don't share the cartoonist's sentiment: either in wanting to see the back of POTUS Donald Trump, once and for all; or in the underly- ing, subliminal message that his Presidency has been (and still is, while he remains in that office) an unsightly blot on all the ide- als supposedly embodied by that particular statue… … but what is missing from the picture also imparts a subliminal message of its own. Like so many other public reactions to the US