As Trump Beat Harris in Presidential Race, Shocked and Baffled Justice Leaders Ask What it Says About America
Civil rights leaders, racial justice advocates of all genres, and Democratic operatives are returning to the drawing board this week as Donald Trump has handily won his presential race against Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black-Asian woman who would have been the first female president of the United States.
The announcement came in the wee hours of Wednesday morning around 2 am when CNN projected that Trump had won the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, a share for which the Harris campaign had vigorously fought.
Trump gave his first speech in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday as the election results became clear even before all votes were counted. The former president, who has spent the past four years denying the fact that he lost the 2020 election to President Joseph Biden, called for unity this week despite his months and years of spewing lies and vicious racist and sexist insults about people to his campaign rallies, during press conferences and debates.
"I'm asking every citizen all across our land to join me in this noble and righteous endeavor. That's what it is. It's time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It's time to unite, and we're gonna try. We're gonna try. We have to try. And it's gonna happen,” Trump said before the jubilant crowd in West Palm Beach, Florida. “Success will bring us together. I've seen that. I've seen that. I saw that in the first term, when we became more and more successful, people started coming together. Success is going to bring us together and we are going to start by all putting America first. We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it. Because together we can truly make America great again for all Americans."
No doubt, for years to come, the nation will study and debate to determine how a presidential candidate perceived to be as crass, insensitive, vulgar and dishonest as now President-elect Trump, could win more than half of America’s votes. The win came on the heels of his two impeachments, four indictments, 34 counts as a convicted felon among a string of other charges. For the most part, he can now pardon himself.
It appears from exit polls that voters who chose Trump did so because of economic and immigration concerns and issues. Millions apparently chose to hold their noses and ignore his often profanity-ladened and racist rhetoric which he and his associates spewed down to the end of his campaign.
As of 11 am on Wednesday, Nov. 6, the nation awaited the concession speech from Vice President Harris, which was to be given at Howard University, where her campaign headquarters had set up to watch the returns on Tuesday night. She was to give her concession speech at about 4 pm on Wednesday.
Although more votes have yet to be counted from absentee and mail in ballots, major news networks called the race for Trump when it became obvious that Harris could not win with votes that were left.
According to the Associated Press, as of this writing, Donald Trump had 277 electoral votes to Harris’ 224. The popular vote was 71,594,846 for him and 66,742,214 for her. Even as more votes are counted, as of this moment, he had won by nearly 5 million votes.
Meanwhile, now President-elect Trump, who will become the 47th president of the United States, said America has given him a mandate as Republicans also won control of the U. S. Senate and possibly the House as more votes were yet to be counted.
"America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate. Wow. That's great. And the Senate races in Montana, Nevada, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were all won by the MAGA movement, they helped so much,” he said. “And in those cases, every one of them, we worked with the senators, they were tough races.”
Black leaders, among others, have already begun planning an intense discussion and planning how best to move forward following the Harris defeat. A Washington, DC town hall meeting to be held by the New York-based Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) will grapple with this very issue in a discussion with dozens of civil rights leaders.
In his promotions for the November 14 event to be held at the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in NW DC, IBW President Dr. Ron Daniels asks the question, “How is it possible that the campaign for the White House is a virtual dead heat when the choice is between sanity and insanity, decency and indecency, a way forward and a return to the past, democracy and fascism.”
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