According to FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 election forecast, Biden currently has a 84% chance of victory in November. While this may sound like a runaway, recall that Trump in 2016 had less than a 29% chance of winning. If we want to be certain of a Biden victory, he needs to win the popular vote by a large margin. Here’s why you should vote for him.
The United States is on fire. Not only is Donald Trump too incompetent to handle it, he’s making things worse at almost every turn. Another four years of Trump would be a disaster. In many ways, the decision over who to vote for this presidential election comes down to a simple question with an easy answer: are things better off than they were four years ago?
Let’s go through a handful of ways in which things are undeniably worse than they were when Biden was in the White House and examine the Trump administration’s role in each.
Trump Fails on the COVID-19 Pandemic
We are fumbling through a pandemic that, as of this writing, has killed more than 210,000 (the actual number is almost certainly far greater). Since the beginning, Trump has failed to appropriately respond to the threat posed by COVID-19, repeatedly downplaying the seriousness of the virus in public while privately acknowledging the reality. He readily admits to this.
Despite decades of warnings from scientists about the devastation a pandemic such as the one we are enduring would bring absent adequate preparedness, the Trump administration in 2018 fired and did not replace the pandemic response team.
As COVID-19 firmly established itself in the United States, the public health experts were in unison on what was required to stop the spread: social distancing, masks, mass testing, and contact tracing.
When Trump refused to entertain the idea of a nationwide lockdown, states took matters into their own hands. But Trump made it clear he was no fan of these lockdowns. Then when his supporters — most apparently believing COVID-19 is a hoax, is caused by 5G towers, is overblown by Democrats and public health experts, or that the people being killed by the virus are not worth saving — began to protest the lockdowns, Trump showered them with praise. The science shows that lockdowns work; Trump didn’t like that this interfered with his campaign rallies.
Trump has also been less than helpful on masks, even though the science is clear. When CDC Director Robert Redfield, a Trump appointee, testified before Congress that wearing a mask may provide more protection than a vaccine, Trump said Redfield was “confused” and “incorrect.” He also did not allow himself to be publicly seen wearing one for months, mocks people for wearing them and demands reporters remove them. And at his rallies, few attendees wear masks, even though many of them are high-risk. Trump even scrapped a USPS plan to send five masks to every household, a move that would have sent a clear message in support of mask-wearing and in turn would have saved lives. The administration also seized shipments of masks and other personal protective equipment ordered by states and hospitals.
Speaking of scrapped plans, Jared Kushner put together a plan to implement the necessary mass-testing Trump promised earlier on, only for the White House to scrap it in favor of putting all of the responsibility on the states. Even more damning, Trump admitted to slowing down testing, in line with his selfish desire to keep the number of confirmed (not actual) cases as low as possible.
Not content with simply failing to follow the science on masks and social distancing, Trump also promoted hazardous cures for COVID-19. He infamously floated the idea of injecting bleach as a potential cure, which people actually tried. He has also consistently and repeatedly lauded hydroxychloroquine — an anti-malaria drug that was thought to treat COVID-19 — even after the research demonstrated that it does not work and may even cause deadly side effects.
With a more competent leader that accurately appraised the threat posed by COVID-19 and appropriately coordinated a nationwide response, many of these deaths, including my own grandmother’s, would not have occurred.
If you want to return to normal life, where you can safely visit friends and family, go to restaurants, enjoy concerts, see a movie, and walk around in public without a mask on, the first step is to remove Trump from office and let the adults handle it.
[Update 10/8/2020: Just days after I published this post, it was revealed that Trump himself tested positive for COVID-19. In the ensuing days and weeks, dozens of other Trump administration officials and White House employees also tested positive. Trump finally faced consequences for his abject failure to manage the pandemic — but even that didn’t stop him from downplaying the severity of the virus.]
Trump Fails on Protests and Racial Justice
In response to recent incidents of police brutality and racist violence, we are seeing a new uprising in pursuit of a criminal justice system that values all lives equally. People of color, particularly black people, and indigenous people are more likely than white people to be killed by police. Black people are more likely than white people to be stopped by police. Black people are given heavier punishments than white people for the same crime. On top of that, black people are more likely than white people to be caught for committing the same offense; for example, in Albany, NY, between July 2019 and July 2020, 97% of the people busted for marijuana were black.
Instead of addressing these concerns, the Trump administration denies the problem. Even worse than doing nothing, Trump himself seems hellbent on actively stoking racial tensions. He fails to reflexively denounce neo-Nazis, who love him and have grown and spread under his leadership. And in response to Black Lives Matter and related protest movements, we’ve seen a rise in armed right-wing vigilante counter-protests, which have led to deadly encounters. These incidents are in line with Trump’s own fascistic efforts to forcefully stamp out BLM and antifa, so Trump predictably approves.
Compare Trump’s leadership to that of Obama during 2016. While he didn’t do everything he could have, he at least struck the right chord.
Trump Fails to Address Climate Change
Climate change, not exactly respectful of our superstitious belief that it will go away if we just ignore it, is predictably getting worse. This means we can expect more wildfires, a worsening hurricane season, and more novel diseases that can more effectively penetrate our immune system, to name just a few effects of climate change. And even though most Republicans and Democrats alike agree that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity (as my own research confirms), the Trump administration is rolling back environmental regulations.
Simply put, Trump doesn’t believe climate change exists. He thinks it’s a hoax. That is unacceptable. Biden at least wants to do something to address the threat posed by man-made climate change. That’s the bare minimum, but Trump can’t meet it.
Trump is Psychologically Unwell
There is a profound malevolence within the commander-in-chief. He applauds when bad things happen to people he doesn’t like. He incites violence against protesters at his rallies. He reflexively calls people names and can’t handle criticism and bad news. He’s a child.
His affinity for inflicting pain against his perceived enemies drives the abject, intentional cruelty of numerous of his policies. (For many of his supporters, this is a feature, not a bug.) He endorses several conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, indicative of a failure to engage in critical thinking.
His cruel disposition also motivates his apparent enjoyment at the rise of hyper-polarization in the form of a dangerous right-wing conspiracism known as QAnon — a conspiracy theory from the bowels of the Internet that posits that the Democratic elite are part of a Satanic cabal that engages in human trafficking and harvests the blood of children. This bizarre Satanic Panic-era conspiracy theory threatens to take over the Republican party.
Whatever else is true of Biden, you can count on him to act like an adult and not call his political opponents pedophiles or accuse them of child trafficking.
Trump Wants to be a Dictator
Let me be blunt: the president is a fascist and we shouldn’t be afraid of saying as much. He wants to be able to do whatever he wants, when he wants, no matter what the Constitution says, no matter what the American people want, no matter what Congress will permit. He wants absolute power. Four more years of Trump means four more years of uninterrupted attempts to grab more power, power that threatens to remain in the hands of the president long after Trump’s departure.
And he doesn’t even hide it. He wants loyalty. He wants to be a king. He openly praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. And in the case of Putin, Trump takes his word over that of his own intelligence community. (In addition to Trump’s general respect for dictatorial bravado, Trump’s kindness toward Putin is almost certainly also due to the fact that Russia helped him win in 2016, which the Trump campaign welcomed and likely assisted, and is helping him win re-election right now.) Dissatisfied with Fox News occasionally failing to act as a campaign mouthpiece, Trump wants to have his own news network, presumably to get the “real truth” out there. This is in line with him calling unflattering reporting “fake news” while endorsing malicious hacks like Infowars and OAN. He even called it a “beautiful sight” when a journalist was shot with a rubber bullet, demonstrating no respect at all for the First Amendment. Simply put, he’s allergic to the facts when they don’t go his way, just like a dictator. Then there are his (and Pence‘s) efforts to continue the march toward theocracy.
Oh yeah, and the open question as to whether or not Trump would actually leave office if he loses. He has said that the only way he would lose is if the election were rigged by Democrats. He refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He ‘jokes’ about staying in office another 12 years. That should alarm everyone.
[Update 10/8/2020: Trump continues to forcefully and persistently inform us of his fascist tendencies. For example, just today he urged Attorney General William Barr to prosecute his political rivals for unspecified crimes and, in response to the revelation that the FBI foiled a plot to kidnap the Michigan Governor, he doubled down on his criticisms of her — criticisms that undoubtedly encouraged the would-be kidnappers in the first place.]
Things are not better than they were four years ago. Even if you don’t feel that you have been personally impacted by the Trump administration, consider what life under Trump is like for people who are not you — immigrants, people of color, Jews, the LGBTQIA+ community. Think about what it would be like to unintentionally become pregnant in 2022 if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade. Think about all the people that will continue to unnecessarily die from a pandemic that Trump failed to adequately address.
Trump was elected in 2016 because 46% of voters supported the candidate that wants to burn it all down. Americans were (and continue to be) sick of a political system that they feel does not adequately represent their interests. Politicians ride into office on campaign promises that rarely come to fruition. By the time they leave, they’ve somehow or other amassed a fortune. Enough voters decided in 2016 that they’d rather destroy the entire system by electing a buffoon with no experience in government than allow business as usual. We are now paying dearly for this mistake.
I am under no illusion that Biden will fix all of our problems. I didn’t vote for him in the primary, I don’t agree with a lot of his policies, and I’d much rather see a progressive candidate who supports implementing tried-and-true policies that help people that are struggling. But in order to take the first step in that direction, we need as forceful a rebuke of Trumpism as possible. We need Biden to win by a margin sufficiently large so as to undercut any possibility that the results will be legitimately in question. For that to be possible, we must vote for him.
Then the real work begins — to hold politicians accountable to their promises, to pass policies that help struggling Americans, and to rid our nation of the insidious hate that permits fascism.
Evan Anderson 
One thought on “We Must Vote for Joe Biden”