Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump on Saturday to become the 46th president of the United States, in a rare upset where a sitting US president loses the reelection bid.
Despite being a closer call than most pundits and pollsters projected, Biden garnered 284 electoral votes compared to Trump’s 214, according to an Associated Press tally of the voting by 538 electors across the country.
Trump became the first president to lose reelection since Republican George H.W. Bush in 1992.
As the 46th US president, Biden is expected to push Washington back in the direction of former President Barack Obama’s liberal agenda.
The Trump campaign was quick to push the election into litigation, filing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. They have also demanded a recount in Wisconsin.
Even before the last few states – Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Alaska – were called for either candidate, Trump claimed on Twitter that “there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!”
Twitter hid that tweet and added an advisory to it saying: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
It was one of several of Trump’s tweets about the election that were hidden and labeled as “disputed and misleading.”
This year’s election was overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed the lives of 230,000 people in the US.
Due to the rapid spread of the virus – something that may have cost Trump the election – the widespread use of mail-in ballots was adopted by millions of voters.
Trump criticized the use of mail-in ballots, claiming that it enabled voter fraud due to the lack of thorough identity checks.
Trump’s only hope now lies in the courts and potentially the Supreme Court where he has appointed three of the nine justices since taking office in 2016.
– With AP