relief

For tens of millions of Americans on Saturday, a great tension broke.

A tension that had tightened in the chest and temples through four years of watching their nation, in their view, become meaner and more hateful, unable to see plain truths and human decency. A nation spinning down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, praising white supremacists as “fine people,” putting children in cages.

President-elect Joe Biden’s victory brought tears of not just joy, but relief — a hissing purge of all that anxiety that had not relented, through so many tweets and outrages and, ultimately, to the possibility that for the first time in American history, a president might refuse to step down.

That prospect still hung in the air Saturday but felt vastly deflated — like many saw President Trump himself — as his attorneys made their unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, inexplicably, in front of a landscaping shop on the industrial edge of Philadelphia.

People raise bottles of champagne as they celebrate near the White House in Washington, DC on Saturday.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Spontaneous celebration erupted around the nation, even amid its worst pandemic in a century. Revelers, for the most part wearing masks, danced and chanted “You’re fired!” Horns honked, flags flew, pots banged, champagne flowed with abandon, from the Bronx to Puerto Rico, Atlanta to Minneapolis, Seattle to South Pasadena.

In Manhattan, thousands poured into the streets, the noise of jubilation thundering through skyscraper canyons.

“We finally have a country back where it’s safe for the children again!” Greg Shlotthauer shouted in Times Square. “A country where we are not ashamed of the man in the White House!”

In Brooklyn, a rabbi’s son blew a shofar ram’s horn from his window. On Los Feliz Boulevard in Los Angeles, a bagpiper played on a street corner as someone else rang a cowbell, and a cardboard sign that read “It’s Over” was pinned to a tree.

In Washington, where protestors were tear-gassed just months ago so Trump could pose with a Bible in front of a church, the mood was festive. Crowds danced. A man sang “Sweet Caroline” in front of the boarded-up Department of Veterans Affairs.

People gathered on the grass at McPherson Square, a few blocks from the White House, to wait for Biden’s acceptance speech. They brought signs that read “Stop tweeting and start packing” and “Grab him by the BALLOTS.”

In Philadelphia, outside the convention center where election workers were finishing the ballot count, celebrants danced to Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” and the Village People’s “YMCA,” — which had been a favorite Trump campaign song.

People react to the election news near Independence Hall in Philadelphia on Saturday morning.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

“Philadelphia saved the world,” said Andrew Phillips, a 49-year-old property manager carrying an “Elections Have Consequences” sign. “We haven’t been this relevant since the 1780s.”

But in a country no less divided than it was before the election, the counterweight to all that exhilaration was anger, resignation and, in the streets, defiance — fueled by the president’s refusal to concede even as his favorite Fox News called the election for Biden and did not run with his baseless fraud claims.

In Philadelphia, dozens of police officers on bike patrol kept revelers apart from Trump supporters, who were demanding to stop the vote counting.

Jim Eberhardt, a 63-year-old school bus driver, drove to Philadelphia from his home in Rockland County, N.Y., to show his opposition to what he says is vote fraud taking place inside the convention center, based on the false claims by Trump.

The president, who has complained that mail ballots were being tallied after election day, on Saturday pledged to continue his fight to overturn the election.

“I felt it was the least I could do to come down,” said Eberhardt, his Trump flag hoisted on his shoulder. “I think the election’s been stolen, obviously.”

Similar scenes played out across the country.

“This isn’t over,” said Lisa Kathryn, at the Michigan state Capitol, still holding her red Trump 2020 sign.

A Trump supporter shouts down counter-protesters during a demonstration Saturday over ballot counting outside the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing.

(John Moore / Getty Images)

“Democrats think they’re going to steal an election? This country will not head into socialism,” Kathryn said, mirroring Republicans’ false claims that the moderate Biden is a radical.

Kathryn, who voted for Trump in 2016 and again this election, said she came to show her support for the president and spend an afternoon with like-minded voters. Dozens of Trump supporters packed in front of the Capitol building, some outfitted in camouflage and openly carrying firearms.

“This is our country,” yelled a man with a megaphone and a Glock 9mm holstered on his right hip. “Freedom!” shouted a woman walking past and offering him a high-five.

Kathryn grinned. “We all love this country just like any other American,” she said. “We are here to speak our minds and stand by President Trump.”

For much of the country, this fervid support made for a bittersweet catharsis, the exhilaration dampened by knowing at least 70 million Americans have doubled down on the Trumpist view of the world, and still mourning all that occurred on his watch.

The author and commentator Van Jones put that emotion in searing terms when he learned of the victory on CNN.

“It’s easier to be a parent this morning. It’s easier to be a dad. It’s easier to tell your kids character matters. It matters. Telling the truth matters. Being a good person matters.”

He choked up, trying to hold back sobs, talking of Muslims who no longer “have a president that doesn’t want you here,” of undocumented immigrants who don’t have to worry about being separated from their children.

“This is a vindication for a lot of people who have really suffered. You know, ‘I can’t breathe.’ You know that wasn’t just George Floyd. That was a lot of people that felt they couldn’t breathe,” Jones said. “Every day you’re waking up and you’re getting these tweets and … you’re going to the store and people who have been afraid to show their racism are getting nastier and nastier to you. And you’re worried about your kids and you’re worried about your sister, and can she just go to Walmart and get back into her car without someone saying something to her?

“And you spent so much of your life energy just trying to hold it together.”

Many Biden supporters felt the racism Trump unleashed in America could never be put back in a bottle.

“There’s a Black woman at the second highest position in the country,” Adriana Holt of Decatur, Ga., said of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “That’s wild. And to know that I had a part in this.”

(Jenny Jarvie/Los Angeles Times)

In Decatur, Ga., Adriana Holt’s elation was weighed down by that reality. But it wasn’t going to stop the party. The 28-year-old Black social media manager and her sister, Alexandria, a sports service representative, piled into a Nissan Juke, switched on “My President” by Young Jeezy and headed into Atlanta.

All over the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, which had been home to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., cars honked horns and blasted the anthem “F— Donald Trump” out of their windows.

Some walked the streets with raised fists. Others smoked cigars or popped open champagne bottles.

“Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Alexandria Holt said as the sisters snapped photos in front of a mural of George Floyd. Adriana nodded.

“Today, I almost feel the first sigh of relief since the day Trump got elected,” she said.

When she woke up four years ago to learn that Trump had been elected president, she felt that America had told her that, as a Black person, a woman, a survivor of sexual assault, she didn’t matter.

“There’s no going back to how it was,” Adriana Holt said. “You know, Trump just made it OK to be racist. So, it’s like the people I knew beforehand, now I know: I can’t be your friend anymore. This is permanent.”

Still, she could feel change. She was born just a month before Georgia voted for its last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and now her home state was tilting blue for the first time she could remember.

“There’s a Black woman at the second highest position in the country,” she said. “That’s wild. And to know that I had a part in this.”

Flashbacks to four years ago still tormented some of the most vulnerable.

Hernan Hernandez-Vela, 31, began to weep as he talked about the racism that many people have endured since Trump took office.

The Las Vegas resident recalled the time someone ran him off the road while he was in the car with his young son. He talked about parents whose children were told to “go back to Mexico.”

“The last four years, our community has been criminalized,” said Hernandez-Vela, who works for La Pulga de Las Vegas, a community organization that helps Latinos. “We just want our kids to feel safe on the playground, to feel safe at school.”

His organization heard from Latinos who weren’t paid for work and were threatened with ICE when they spoke up.

When he was a child, Hernandez-Vela would read about Martin Luther King and the racial issues that divided the country. He felt like King brought it to light and laws were changed.

“But Trump came and brought all that back. He single-handedly targeted the Hispanic community,” he said. For Hernandez-Vela, whose parents were immigrants from Mexico, Biden’s win meant everything.

“We feel like we’re human again,” he said. “With Biden winning, we feel like we finally have a voice. We have somebody in office who cares about our community, who cares about our families.

“He shows that racism isn’t right, that hatred isn’t right,” he said.

Janet Pulido, 19, in small-town Siler City, N.C., remembered watching classmates come to school wearing Trump gear to celebrate.

“Everybody’s racism came out,” she said. For Pulido, it hit hard. Her family immigrated from Veracruz, Mexico, in 1999, and some still lacked legal status.

On Saturday, when she went to Walmart, a sense of joy washed over her as she noted that the Trump hats and shirts she normally saw on customers were conspicuously absent.

“As the day goes on, it’s starting to hit me more,” she said. “Come Jan. 20, he’s gone. That’s it. The nightmare’s over.”

The stakes of this election were the starkest for those on the margins.

In Austin, Texas, Marco Jaramillo said Biden’s election meant the end of living under the cloud of deportation. His legal status in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was under threat as Trump fought to end the Obama-era program.

“It means a lot of hope, because Biden has already said he’s going to make it permanent,” he said.

Jaramillo, 32, was brought from Mexico to the U.S. as a child by his parents and runs a local cleaning business.

He said he spent the past four years “living in fear of deportation.”

He joined Saturday’s crowd in celebrating with handmade signs that said, “Love over hate” and “We are all Dreamers” in Spanish.

Friend and fellow DACA recipient Raul Armenta said he was tired of spending years listening to the president demonize Mexican immigrants

“We’re not criminals,” Armenta said. “I feel content now that they can’t make us leave.”

In a spontaneous crowd outside the Palacio del Sol in Las Vegas, Mayra Aguirre, 38, felt “mega feliz,” she said — super happy — because it felt like democracy was rescued.

The last four years had felt like a weight, she said. “I felt like the country was broken, like I was drowning,” Mayra said. She felt the racism in the community. Over the past three days, she hasn’t slept. And when she did, it was only for two hours.

“Today, when I heard the news, I felt like I could breathe,” she said. “I feel like the country is coming together again … we’re going back to the country we were before Trump got into the White House.”

Her family grouped together and sang a spin on a song by the Miami group Los 3 de la Habana. The original version went “voy a votar por Donald Trump.” (“I’m going to vote for Donald Trump.”)

They sang a new version: “Que alegre soy, voy a botar a Donald Trump — fuera de La Casa Blanca.” (“I’m so happy, I’m going to kick out Donald Trump out of the White House.”)

In other cities, the tug-of-war between celebrants and Trump supporters was more fraught.

In Austin, several hundred Trump supporters waving flags and signs reading “Stop the Steal” and “Fraud” chanted and shouted at a smaller crowd of Biden supporters across the street. More than a dozen bicycle police pedaled between the two sides, intervening when Trump supporters crossed the street.

At least one Trump supporter was carrying an AR-15 rifle slung across his chest. A pickup truck slowed as it passed the Trump crowd and the driver shouted, “The nonsense is over!”

A bicycle food delivery worker pedaled in his wake, calmly adding, “It’s over, guys.”

Trump supporter Elizabeth Brumbaugh, 62, disagreed. “It’s not over!” she shouted, holding her Trump 2020 sign aloft “Count the legal votes, not the illegal!”

“You lost — take it like a man!” Natalie Roberts, 43, shouted at the occupants of a pickup truck with a Trump sign in the back, who grew livid. Roberts, a single mother who runs an Austin social media marketing company, voted for Biden but hadn’t joined a protest until she saw the pro-Trump crowd Saturday.

Christian Rico, 20, a student at Concordia University, took turns with a friend chanting through a bullhorn at Trump supporters: “You guys lost!”

A Biden supporter began blasting Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” And on it went.

People celebrate in Orlando, Saturday, after Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump to become 46th president of the United States.

(Melissa Gomez/Los Angeles Times)

As an event in downtown Orlando came to a close, 61-year-old retiree Don Luellen happily held a homemade “Biden Harris 2020” sign but worried about the future.

“Trump has done nothing but divide our country for the last four years,” he said. He fears the president won’t stop.

“My greatest fear is that even though Biden is president, that Trump will not be quiet and will keep on drumming up hatred and division,” he said. “I’m scared to death of them and militias.”

“But I’m hoping that when Biden starts to get into the presidency, that a lot of people that feel that way will start to calm down.”

WASHINGTON — A deal that could end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history is poised to head to the House, where Democrats are launching a last-ditch effort to block a spending agreement reached in the Senate that does not address healthcare costs.

The push comes as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) urged House members on Monday to start making their way back to Washington in anticipation of the chamber voting on a spending package later in the week. The Senate began taking a series of votes Monday night, a day after Senate Republicans reached a deal with eight senators who caucus with Democrats.

The spending plan, which does not include an extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, has frustrated many Democrats who spent seven weeks pressuring Republicans to extend the tax credits. It would, however, fund the government through January, reinstate federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown and ensure that federal employees who were furloughed receive back pay.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) also promised senators a vote in December that would put lawmakers on record on the healthcare subsidies. Thune said in a speech Monday that he was “grateful that the end is in sight” with the compromise.

“The American people have suffered long enough,” he said. “Let’s not pointlessly drag this bill out. Let’s get it done, get it over to the House so we can get this government open.”

Senate Democrats who defected have argued that a vote is the best deal they could get as the minority party, and that forcing vulnerable Republicans in the chamber to vote on the issue will help them win ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

As the Senate prepared to vote on the deal Monday, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader of the chamber, continued to reiterate his opposition to what he called a “Republican bill.” Schumer, who has faced backlash from Democrats for losing members of his caucus, said the bill “fails to do anything of substance to fix America’s healthcare crisis.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) speaks to reporters about the government shutdown.

(Mariam Zuhaib / Associated Press)

Thune’s promise to allow a vote in the Senate does not guarantee a favorable outcome for Democrats, who would need to secure Republican votes for passage through the chamber. And the chance to address healthcare costs will be made even harder by Johnson, who has not committed to holding a vote on his chamber in the future.

“I’m not promising anybody anything,” he said. “I’m going to let the process play out.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, told reporters that House Democrats will continue to make the case that extending the subsidies is what Americans are demanding from elected officials, and that there is still a fight to be waged in the chamber — even if it is a long shot.

“What we are going to continue to do as House Democrats is to partner with our allies throughout America is to wage the fight, to stay in the Colosseum,” Jeffries said at a news conference.

Some Republicans have agreed with Democrats during the shutdown that healthcare costs need to be addressed, but it is unlikely that House Democrats will be able to build enough bipartisan support to block the deal in the chamber.

Still, Jeffries said the “loudmouths” in the Republican Party who want to do something about healthcare costs have an opportunity to act now that the House is expected to be back in session.

“They can no longer hide. They can no longer hide,” Jeffries said. “They are not going to be able to hide this week when they return from their vacation.”

Democrats believed that fighting for an extension of healthcare tax credits, even at the expense of shutting down the government, would highlight their messaging on affordability, a political platform that helped lead their party to victory in elections across the country last week.

If the tax credits are allowed to lapse at the end of the year, millions of Americans are expected to see their monthly premiums double.

In California, premiums for federally subsidized plans available through Covered California will soar by 97% on average next year.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune answers questions Monday about a possible end to the government shutdown after eight members of the Democratic caucus broke ranks and voted with Republicans.

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

California’s U.S. senators, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, were among the Democrats who voted against the deal to reopen the government because it did not address healthcare costs.

“We owe our constituents better than this. We owe a resolution that makes it possible for them to afford healthcare,” Schiff said in a video Sunday night.

Some Republicans too have warned that their party faces backlash in the midterm elections next year if it doesn’t come up with a more comprehensive health plan.

“We have always been open to finding solutions to reduce the oppressive cost of healthcare under the unaffordable care act,” Johnson said Monday.

A final vote could still take several days. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, for one, has said he supports an expeditious vote to reopen the government, but is insisting on a prior vote on an amendment that would eliminate language from the spending deal he says would “unfairly target Kentucky’s hemp industry.”

Without unanimous consent to proceed, the final Senate vote could end up bogged down by procedural delays.

Johnson, meanwhile, has asked members to return by Wednesday in anticipation of a vote in the latter part of the week. Republicans expect to have the votes to pass it, Johnson said.

Any piece of legislation needs to be approved by both the Senate and House and be signed by the president.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, President Trump said he would support the legislative deal to reopen the government.

“We’re going to be opening up our country,” Trump said. “Too bad it was closed, but we’ll be opening up our country very quickly.”

Trump added that he would abide by a provision that would require his administration to reinstate federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown.

“The deal is very good,” he said.

Johnson said he spoke to the president on Sunday night and described Trump as “very anxious” to reopen the government.

“It’s after 40 days of wandering in the wilderness, and making the American people suffer needlessly, that some Senate Democrats finally have stepped forward to end the pain,” Johnson said. “Our long national nightmare is finally coming to an end, and we’re grateful for that.”