Forget About Trump’s Lawsuits—Take the Win and Let Yourself Exhale

Among large classifications of homo sapiens seemingly unable to process victory, success, or triumph over one’s purported opponents, Democrats and the left-leaning rank in the highest percentile. (What’s that, you say? Fortune has smiled upon you and, by happenstance or keen yearning and struggle, the world is, at last, bestowing its graces upon you? Sit back while we unpack the myriad ways in which this is not only Bad but also Wrong.)

Today’s news that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have passed the Electoral College threshold of 270 is just the kind of low-hanging fruit that semi-professional naysayers and hopelessly addicted doom-scrollers like to seize upon. No, we didn’t get the landslide that many predicted; for the moment, at least, Democrats have lost seats in the House and don’t appear to have flipped the Senate (more on that in a bit) and, thus, any hopes of addressing institutional voter reform—or addressing what’s essentially become a gerrymandered Supreme Court—would appear to be dead on the vine.

Here’s what did happen, though: Biden and Harris received more votes than any other candidates for our nation’s highest offices in history. At the moment, their margin stands at over 4 million—more than the population of 22 American states. Would we have preferred an Electoral College blowout of a magnitude that resigned not only Trump but Trumpism at large to the dustbin of history? That goes without saying—but it’s also beside the point.

It’s going to be years until we understand the entirety of the damage that a single term of Donald Trump’s presidency wrought upon our country (and our psyches). The struggle for a better America—the need to keep our foot on the gas and to hold our elected officials accountable for actually governing the country rather than merely stoking fissures and seams of division—will continue, must continue, no matter which party controls which branch of government.

But let’s take a breath and turn off the noise for just a moment. Think back to how you felt when—or if—you went to bed on Tuesday night versus how you feel now. Barring the sort of tin-pot dictator chicanery that we have, sadly, come to expect from Donald Trump—Will he barricade himself inside the White House? Will he do anything more than file halfhearted lawsuits claiming some vague sort of badness in various states and otherwise use the bully pulpit of ALL CAPS TWEETS to fire up various MAGA social-media surrogates as to the injustice being done to him?—withstand all that ado about, essentially, nothing, and we’re 76 days away from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. (A quick note about those lawsuits: They are, to put a fine legal gloss on it, garbage. The motions filed in Georgia and Michigan have already been tossed by judges weighing small matters like “lack of standing,” “witnesses,” and “evidence.” And while the Pennsylvania “stop the counting”—sorry, “STOP THE COUNTING!”—lawsuit may still be taken up by the Supreme Court, the number of votes affected by even an adverse ruling likely won’t be enough to affect the Biden margin in that state.)

And so—in the manner of every mansplainer ever attempting to unlock the philosophical precepts of a flawed but ultimately victorious NFL football game to the uninitiated—I’ll heartily recommend this: Take the win. Sure, the battle wasn’t pretty; yes, in retrospect there were a ton of things that we didn’t see coming, that we should have done differently; yeah, we’ve got a lot of work still ahead of us.

In the meantime: Let’s compose a requiem to doom-scrolling. Let’s enjoy waking up without worrying about whether or not the President of the United States has withdrawn the country from another longstanding alliance with our allies—or has simply been up all night playing Angry Tweets again. Let’s look forward to the possibility of politics—if even for just a small moment—becoming boring again as policy takes precedence over partisanship.

It’s not going to last for long, so let’s remember what it was like to dream a little.

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