As questions continued to swirl about the 2020 presidential race, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden spoke out to the American people on Wednesday. Before Biden’s remarks, Donald Trump had been pretty vocal in his perspective on the election: he has alleged that post-Election Day shifts in vote tallies are some kind of Democratic plot to steal the election, which they are not, in any respect whatsoever. Biden pushed back on this false perspective during his own Wednesday remarks. Biden insisted that “every vote must be counted,” and he insisted that “no one’s going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever.” Are you listening, Trump?
Biden said, in part:
‘A government of, by, and for the people is very much alive, very much alive in America. Here, the people rule. Power can’t be taken or asserted. It flows from the people. And it is their will that determines who will be the president of the U.S. and their will alone… To make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies… We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied. We the people will not surrender. My friends, I’m confident we’ll emerge victorious.’
Joe Biden: "A government of, by, and for the people is very much alive, very much alive in America. Here, the people rule. Power can't be taken or asserted. It flows from the people. And it is their will that determines who will be the president of the U.S. and their will alone."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 4, 2020
Joe Biden: "To make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 4, 2020
Joe Biden: "Every vote must be counted. No one's going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 4, 2020
Watch Biden’s full remarks below:
Shouldn’t a sitting U.S. president be expected to express similar sentiments? Shouldn’t it be expected that a president of the United States would agree that “every vote must be counted”? Instead, the actual current president continues to push anti-democratic conspiracy theories. He insists that local elections officials are somehow out to get him during the vote-counting process, when they’re simply doing their jobs of counting votes. There’s no conspiracy.
Trump and his allies have already run to the court system. The Trump campaign has filed a lawsuit in the state of Michigan, where they’re seeking to stop ballot-counting until they get the ballot-counting observation access that they want. To be clear: there is no evidence that the Trump campaign has been excluded from observing the ballot-counting process in any significant fashion — although that didn’t stop some of the president’s supporters from banging on the windows of a ballot-processing facility in Detroit like unhinged maniacs. News organizations have called Michigan for Biden, putting the Democratic nominee within striking distance of winning the presidency after an earlier call of Wisconsin for Biden.
