Barring a glitch in the Matrix, Joe Biden is soon to be the president-elect of the United States. In a record showing of voter turnout this year, the former deputy president received the single-highest number of votes of any American president in history. In addition Kamala Harris, his vice president-elect, is set to be America's first female vice president. One for the history books then.

Donald Trump lost in several key states, ultimately being knocked out entirely when he lost Pennsylvania, a massive state in terms of electoral votes. The exiting president Trump has taken the defeat with all the humility and grace befitting his station. Is what one would say of anyone but Trump. Rather, POTUS called the result a fraud, launched multiple failed legal challenges, and on Thursday evening spouted a litany of outright lies about the process that forced major television networks to cut him off and clarify.

Come inauguration time in 2021, this will be a distant headache that may take some time to subside, but subside it shall.

After-shocks

And while the majority of the world will be breathing a sigh of relief that America can once be 'normal' again, there were 70-odd million voting-age Americans who voted for the loser. The fabric of American politics, and what makes a candidate electable, has forever been restitched. Polls predicting an easy glide for Biden showed that, outside of the urban hubs, rural America is almost exclusively pro-Trump. That is a gulf that Trump couldn't be arsed to bridge, given that it actively served his political ends. But it is one that Biden will likely need to face sooner rather than later.

Trump's acidic political 'style' emboldened predominantly white men the world around in their own belief systems. The extent to which this writer received enough hatemail on a daily basis indicated that, to some degree, Trump's poison was tonic for many South Africans. 

But in as much as Trump served as a lodestar for amplifying fragile masculinity larger than a 5G tower's broadcast range in all the wrong ways possible, his electoral demise will see just as large a singularity that Biden will seek to reverse.