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The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
News / Opinion / Columns

Calmes: Thank Biden for a peaceful process

By Jackie Calmes
Published: December 24, 2024, 6:01am

Did you miss it? Last week, the Electoral College made official what we’ve known for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency.

Americans could be excused for being unaware that electors met in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia to cast votes. In nearly every presidential election year, the constitutionally required but largely ceremonial event passes with little notice.

The tragic exception, of course, was in 2020: Loser Trump followed weeks of lies and scores of lawsuits alleging election fraud with an illegal scheme creating fake pro-Trump electors in battleground states — a prelude to the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

It’s great that the transfer of power is proceeding peacefully. You can thank President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. No one can credibly doubt that, had he lost again, he’d be raising another ruckus. Or worse, there’d be violence.

States and the federal government prepared for mayhem that never came. Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election officer who four years ago publicly and presciently warned Trump that “someone’s going to get killed” because of his provocations, said of the electors’ meeting this week, “To be honest, I forgot about it.”

But as Biden said, “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Biden expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Indeed. And that’s why, with an uneventful Electoral College vote, Americans should take the occasion to note the damage that Trump has wrought to the citizenry’s faith in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them.

Trump has gone silent about “rigged” elections since he won in November. And yet, up to the final hours of voting, he was crying foul. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” he posted on Election Day.

City and state officials — including Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia’s board of elections — reposted Trump’s lie to insist there was “absolutely no truth” to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic attacks and threats online. Countless election workers have known the feeling. Thanks, Trump.

After Trump won Pennsylvania, he clammed up about Democrats’ alleged heists there and in all six other battleground states that he carried, including four states governed by Democrats. I guess as vote riggers go, Democrats are just inept?

Trump has not, however, changed his tune about the 2020 election. So it is that he’s tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to be U.S. attorney general. She was part of “the first wave of the Big Lie,” as former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the House Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Team Trump’s ludicrous news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she was fulminating on Fox News: “We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania.”

In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the Jan. 6 committee that Bondi contacted her before she testified to press Hutchinson to remain loyal to Trump, according to the Washington Post. This year, Bondi echoed Trump’s falsehoods about noncitizens voting. And she promised retribution for Trump’s indictments: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted.”

No doubt Bondi, as the next attorney general, would carry out Trump’s calls for the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get House Jan. 6 committee members behind bars.

“Is she going to continue … pushing out the Big Lie?” California’s new Democratic senator and Jan. 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff recently asked on MSNBC.

That was a rhetorical question, of course.

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