The evening before Election Day. Even more barricades are being erected around the area of the White House.
Photo from our hotel room. Election Day evening we checked into a hotel very close to the White House, and managed to get a room overlooking the newly renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza. This plaza leads right up to a gate that's part of the White House barricade.
You can see in a photo above, a large screen was set up on BLM Plaza to monitor the polls on Tuesday night. At around 8 pm it looked like Biden was going to win by a landslide, but a couple hours later states were quickly flipping blue to red, and it seemed like the 2016 election all over again. Then when I woke up at around 5:30 Wednesday morning, I was surprised to hear that Biden was still in the race. What a nail-biter of an election!
By Thursday it was obvious that Trump was going to lose, but news reports were saying that all of the remaining ballots in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona would not be completely counted until Sunday or Monday. Thus I was startled when the news that Biden won was announced on Saturday morning. I headed for the White House at around 1 pm and, as you can see from the above photos, people were already rushing out onto the streets of downtown DC to celebrate.
While thousands of Biden fans were quickly converging on BLM Plaza to celebrate, some Trump supporters gathered at the Washington Monument to protest. The Stop the Steal movement has begun. So stupid, really, considering there is no evidence of voter fraud, and, as the joke goes, if the Democrats were clever enough to rig the election and orchestrate Trump's loss, they most certainly would have also set up Mitch McConnell for defeat.
You can see in the above photo BLM Plaza on Saturday night. Beyond those red lights is Lafayette Square Park, and beyond that-- and more barricades, is the White House. With revelers drinking, drumming, cheering, playing music, dancing, shooting off fireworks, it's unlikely that Trump got much sleep last night. So here we are with a new president already starting the transition process, while at the same time Trump is declaring himself the winner. He can continue to rant and rave and refuse to concede all he wants for now, but should he decide not to vacate on 20 January 2021, ironically, the very people whose job it is to protect him - - the Secret Service, will be escorting Trump off the White House premises. 