Biden Calls for Unity, Tolerance as Trump Refuses to Concede

(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Joe Biden called on Americans to put aside the divisiveness of the past four years under Donald Trump with a victory speech that promised swift action against the coronavirus pandemic and an orderly transfer of power after a bitter election.

“Let’s give each other a chance,” Biden told a cheering, honking crowd at a drive-in rally on Saturday night in Wilmington, Delaware, hours after he clinched the presidency.

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans,” he said, even as Trump claimed victory for himself.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris acknowledged her place as the first Black and Indian-American woman to serve in the role. She told the drive-in rally that they had chosen “hope and unity, decency, science and yes, truth.”

Harris, 56, wore white, the color of suffragettes. She said she stood “on the shoulders” of struggling women like her mother, an immigrant. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said.

Biden’s message of healing and unity capped a day of celebration by his supporters that contrasted with recrimination from Trump, who rejected the outcome of the election and vowed to contest individual state results in court. The Democrats’ victory was sealed shortly before noon New York time on Saturday, when Associated Press and television networks called the race in his favor.

By being declared the winner in Pennsylvania, Biden, 77, passed the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to capture the presidency. He could end up with 306 votes if he wins in all the states where he is currently leading, a slightly larger edge than Trump had in 2016, when he secured 304 electoral votes.

Trump was in no mood to concede or even to signal to his supporters that it was time to stop the competition.

“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” Trump tweeted shortly before the race was called. On Saturday afternoon, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared outside a Philadelphia landscaping company to declare without evidence that the Pennsylvania election was riddled with irregularities. Biden’s margin was just over 37,000 votes out of more than 6.6 million cast in the state.

Trump was notably quiet during Biden’s speech and the minutes after it ended. During the campaign, he would frequently tweet criticism of Biden and other Democrats as they spoke.

The president’s campaign has filed a series of lawsuits and recount demands, but several cases have already been dismissed and none of them so far seems to have the potential to change the race.

Biden moved quickly in his prime-time address to claim his place as the incoming commander-in-chief. He immediately addressed the central theme of his campaign -- that he was more capable of responding to the coronavirus pandemic that has cost more than 237,000 lives in the U.S.

‘Bedrock of Science’

He announced that on Monday, he would name a group of advisers to convert his campaign ideas for containing the pandemic into policy that he said would start on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.

“That plan will be built on a bedrock of science,” Biden said. “It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern.”

The task force will be co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of public health at Yale University, according to a person familiar with his plans. It will also include Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama administration health adviser.

The co-chairs are scheduled to brief Biden on Monday after the rest of the task force is announced.

Biden also planned to quickly name his chief of staff, widely expected to be Ron Klain, a longtime aide who served as his vice presidential chief of staff during the administration of President Barack Obama. Klain also had leading roles in helping Biden manage the recovery from the 2008 economic crisis as well as the Ebola infections in the U.S. in 2014, which never topped 11 cases.

But many of Biden’s supporters didn’t wait for those administrative announcements to express their joy at the results.

In major U.S. cities that overwhelmingly supported Biden, large crowds gathered on the warm autumn afternoon to celebrate. Street parties erupted on the streets in front of the White House, in New York City’s Times Square and in downtown Philadelphia, with people wearing Biden campaign gear, the rainbow symbol of the LGBTQ community and Black Lives Matter T-shirts.

The silence from Republican office-holders was palpable, as they waited for the party’s standard-bearer to concede the race. A few GOP members of Congress, including Utah Senator Mitt Romney and Michigan Representative Fred Upton offered congratulations to Biden and Harris. But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was noticeably silent along with others. Some echoed Trump that the race “was not over.”

Many world leaders extended their congratulations to Biden, saying they looked forward to working with a president who promised to return the U.S. to the global community after Trump’s isolationist bent. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called Biden’s victory a chance for a new beginning in transatlantic ties -- a “New Deal.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent separate congratulatory tweets, one to Biden and one to Harris that said she had inspired Indian-Americans.

Trump’s staff at the campaign headquarters and the White House were left with no guidance from their boss while internal bickering began. The race was called while Trump was at his golf course in northern Virginia. Many of his exhausted aides had headed home for the weekend, to rest and to escape the latest White House coronavirus outbreak that infected the chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

There was no all-hands staff meeting or memo on how officials should react. It was a marked contrast from the scene four years ago, when, after Trump won election, Obama gathered his own despondent staff in the Oval Office for a pep talk.

Biden, in his victory speech promised a new tone of cooperation within the government, calling it “an inflection point.”

“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” he said.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.