16 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
PHILADELPHIAPOSTCARD
OVERIT
I
t was about 5 p.m. on November 5th.
Inside the Convention Center in Phil-
adelphia, the votes that would determine
the Presidential election were being
counted. Outside, Anne Palagruto, in her
burgundy medical scrubs, was over it.
The noise was too much. The closed
streets were tying the city in knots.
“This is ridiculous,” she said.
The day was warm and balmy, and
about three hundred Biden supporters
were there to insist that every vote be
counted. A few feet away, hemmed into
a barricade cage, about twenty Trump
supporters stood, waving Trump flags
and being jeered by the Biden group.
The Biden supporters had a d.j., and the
music was loud. Earlier, there had been
a particularly good run of Whitney Hous-
ton and James Brown and the “Cha Cha
Slide.” Even one of the Trump people
had been dancing to that one.
“I tell you the truth, I don’t see the
point,” Palagruto said. “They count every
vote either way. It’s the law. Not that I’m
against protest, but I think, C’mon. They ’re
counting the votes! It took me an extra
hour to get home because of traffic.” She
had just finished her shift at a nearby
hospital, where she works as a lab tech-
nician. From about fifty feet away, in front
of a Panera Bread, she watched the scene.
“They’re gonna count the votes whether
you’re chanting or not!” she yelled, cup-
ping her hands around her mouth.
“They’re counting ’em! Now go home!”
Palagruto has an accent so acute—
“gonna” was “go-won-a”—and an atti-
tude so Philly-specific that, if the city
ever wanted a no-B.S. tourism spokes-
person, no one but her would suffice.
Come to Philly, she’d say. Or don’t. No
one cares.
She’d been dropped off earlier by her
husband. “I jumped out of the car. He
won’t come here because he’s afraid of
everything,” she joked. Since the elec-
tion, he’d been talking about voter fraud,
but Palagruto wasn’t having it. “He’s what
I would call naïve. He’s not stupid, he
just believes a lot of stuff. He doesn’t look
anything up. I say, ‘I’ll listen to your pain
if you can back it up.’”
Down the street, a pair of women
were making “Every Vote Counts” signs
on the sidewalk. A man walked by wear-
ing a “Leave Philly Alone” T-shirt. The
chanting of “Count every vote!” got
louder. Someone was beating a drum.
“And you know why I’m annoyed,
too?” Palagruto said. “Because my house
had a flood. Somebody flushed the toi-
let. They tell you, make sure you hear it
stop after you flush, right? But who lis-
tens? So somebody flushed it, we went
to bed, and it overflowed the whole eight
or ten hours we were sleeping! I’m laugh-
ing now, because what are you gonna do?”
A river of bicycle cops flowed by. Three
helicopters hovered, their rotors rattling
like a lunatic washing machine.
“So the water was in the floor,” she
continued, “and the ceiling. It built up
like a fish tank, and eventually got too
heavy, and in the morning the upstairs
was downstairs. So they put us in a hotel,
and guess where it is? Across the street
from City Hall!”
First, there’d been the protests fol-
lowing the police killing of Walter Wal-
lace, Jr., and now this. “I can’t go outside
at night, because there’s curfews,” she
said. “And you can’t go to Wawa. There’s
no food. So I have to cook. Who wants
to cook at a hotel?”
At the barricades, Trump supporters
waved signs that read “Stop the Cheat.”
These signs had been printed profes-
sionally, indicating a possibility that
they’d been printed before Election Day.
“You can’t cheat,” Palagruto said. “You
which might galvanize followers and
donors after he leaves office. According
to the Post, the President told advisers
last week, “I’m just going to run in 2024.
I’m just going to run again.” His cam-
paign has formed a political-action com-
mittee, called Save America, which ap-
pears designed as a means for him to
raise money to influence the Republi-
can Party after his Presidency ends. The
pac is eligible to receive funds now for
Trump’s “election defense,” but much
of that money would likely be spent
on other causes and candidates. Leave
it to Trump to manufacture a constitu-
tional crisis that also incorporates a
fund-raising con.
The sheer theatricality of Trump’s
refusal to concede is a distraction from
his failure, once again, to take the coro-
navirus pandemic seriously. Last week,
the country set a new daily record for
infections—more than a hundred and
sixty thousand—and hospitalizations
also reached a new high, after doubling
during the past month. As this crisis un-
folded, the President retweeted Sean
Hannity, Jon Voight, and other acolytes
backing his election-fraud claims. He
did pause to communicate about the
pandemic, but only to complain, with-
out evidence, that Pfizer’s announcement
of progress on an effective vaccine—a
revelation made two days after Biden’s
victory—was timed intentionally to hurt
his reëlection campaign. Biden, in his
first action as President-elect, appointed
a panel of doctors and public-health spe-
cialists to advise him on the pandemic,
but they won’t have real power for an-
other two months, and, in the mean-
time, the Administration’s refusal to au-
thorize briefings and funding for Biden’s
transition means that his pandemic ad-
visers will be deprived of vital informa-
tion. Trump and his allies are “engaged
in an absurd circus right now,” Nancy
Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, said
on Thursday, which is “making it even
harder” to combat the coronavirus.
The pandemic has claimed more than
two hundred and forty thousand Amer-
ican lives, yet Trump has failed to see
that his duty as President requires him
to prioritize the safety of all citizens, even
when this may not advantage him po-
litically. During the campaign, he tried
to delegitimize the form of voting most
likely to protect people from the disease
that his Administration had failed to
contain. He did this because, as he said
in April, voting by mail “doesn’t work
out well for Republicans.” Now the Pres-
ident seems determined to put the pur-
suit of his invented claims of vote-rig-
ging before his responsibility to address
the economic and health impacts of what
may be the most difficult surge of the
pandemic yet. Trump’s presumptive last
act in the White House is shaping up to
be as bankrupt as all that came before.
—Steve Coll
