Joe Biden by Beatrice Gormley (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

By October 14, more than 216,000 Americans had died of the disease, and more than a million worldwide had lost a father or mother, a brother or sister, a grandparent, a dear friend.

And although, as Trump pointed out, the stock market was doing well, ordinary Americans were struggling to make ends meet. The money from the one-time direct payments to individuals from the CARES Act had run out quickly, and the increased unemployment benefits had ended, or would end soon. A chorus of economists, corporate executives, and business leaders, as well as workers, warned that the US economy faced disaster unless Congress passed a second economic stimulus bill. They urged the president and the Senate to work with the House of Representatives and pass a rescue package before the election.

On October 7, Senator Kamala Harris had met Vice President Mike Pence at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City for the vice presidential debate. She’d called the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic “the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country.” She’d also accused Trump and the Republican Senate of ramming through the confirmation of a conservative Supreme Court justice, rather than passing a desperately needed economic stimulus bill for the American people.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump continued to grow slightly, but there was concern that no matter who won, the result might not be clear for several days or even weeks. That would be different from most past presidential elections, when the results had been clear by late on election night, or early the next morning. Normally, by then the winning candidate had been declared, and the losing candidate had conceded.

However, in 2020, about one-third of voters—many more Democrats than Republicans—planned to cast their vote for president by mail. Some of the key “swing states,” in which the election was expected to be close, were not prepared to count all the mail-in ballots quickly. And so the winner in those states, especially Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, might not be declared for several days. Trump, perhaps seeing an advantage for Republicans, demanded that the presidential election must be decided by the tallies on election night. Actually, the president had no power to enforce this demand.

As it turned out, the tallies on Tuesday evening did favor President Trump. Late that night he announced that he had won, and that he wanted “all voting” to stop. Of course all the voting had already taken place. But tens of millions of votes were still to be counted.

On Wednesday afternoon, Joe Biden stated, calmly but very firmly, “Every vote must be counted.” It was not the will of Donald Trump, or of any candidate, that would determine who became the next president of the United States. It was the will of the people. “And their will alone.”

This was a historic election, in that more people had cast votes for president than ever before in the history of the US. As the election workers in every state of the Union kept on counting, the mail-in ballots began shifting the numbers in Joe Biden’s favor. But the results were still not clear on Wednesday night—or on Thursday. Or on Friday.

To Biden’s joy, it was the state of Pennsylvania, where he was born, that finally clinched his victory. On Saturday morning, November 7, the major TV networks announced that Biden had won Pennsylvania’s twenty electoral votes, putting him over the 270 needed to win the election. The outcome in a few more states was uncertain, but Joseph R. Biden Jr. was the president-elect of the United States. He would be inaugurated as the forty-sixth president on January 20, 2021.

On Saturday evening, Kamala Harris, who would become the first female vice president as well as the first vice president of color, greeted a crowd in Wilmington so excited they could hardly stop cheering to let her speak. After her remarks, Joe Biden jogged smiling onto the stage. “I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify,” he told the nation. He promised to work as hard for the people who had not voted for him as for those who had.

When Joe had finished speaking, his family and Kamala’s family joined the victorious two on the stage. They all milled happily around, swaying to the music and watching the celebratory fireworks display.

At long last, Joseph R. Biden Jr. had achieved the dream he’d once cherished as a twelve-year-old boy. But he was taking on an enormous task. Of all the US presidents, only Abraham Lincoln, on the brink of the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt, in the Great Depression and then World War II, had faced more serious crises. Joe Biden knew this, and even during the run for the White House, he had been planning how he and his team would go about running the government.

First of all, the country was deeply divided. Although more than 75 million Americans had voted to make Joe Biden the next president, more than 70 million had voted to keep Donald Trump in office. Could President Biden gain the whole country’s trust? Biden would need to prove that he was president for all Americans, not only his political allies, or the people who could do him favors. Fortunately, this inclusive way of leading came naturally to Joe Biden—it was the kind of leader he’d been even as a young boy.

Then there was the ongoing pandemic. Biden had already reached out to many experts and gathered a team ready to take charge of controlling the coronavirus. However, the Trump administration’s advice and actions about COVID-19 had been so confusing that large numbers of Americans were not following the CDC guidelines. And only half of Americans said they were willing to be vaccinated—when a vaccine was available. In order for the pandemic to be controlled, a majority of Americans would need to cooperate.

Once the pandemic was under control, the national economy would be able to recover. Until then, the nation’s