Eight days into his tenure, President Joe Biden has not occupied my every waking thought—nor, I suspect, yours. He has not insulted anyone, as far as I’m aware. He has not played golf instead of working, or held late-night counselling sessions with cable-television anchors, or caused a rupture in our relationship with Australia. He had a friendly call with Angela Merkel, and a stern one with Vladimir Putin. He went to church on Sunday, and stopped for bagels in Georgetown. His tweets have been sparse and so anodyne that a writer for the Washington Post compared them to the sayings that come inside fortune cookies. He has returned policy wonks and message discipline to the White House. Technocrats are in; Rudy Giuliani is out.
In some ways, Biden has already fulfilled his first, and arguably most compelling, campaign promise: being the un-Trump. Just three weeks ago, the former President was seeking to overturn the results of the Electoral College and exhorting a white-supremacist mob that later stormed the Capitol. Biden’s scandals so far—buying a Peloton bike, wearing an expensive Rolex watch—look to be more of the Obama-wore-a-tan-suit variety. Shrinking the Presidency back into its pre-Trump size in our collective consciousness may be the easiest part.
Even the partisan feuding that quickly erupted in Washington this week could end up being a familiar reminder of pre-Trump times—which were, after all, also characterized by a Democratic President calling for bipartisan unity but ending up in gridlocked dysfunction. Karl Rove is already warning that Biden is a socialist masquerading as a centrist. Tom Cotton is already accusing Biden of appeasing Iran. This simply may be what normal now looks like in American politics.
But I wouldn’t be too sure. A week into a new Presidency is a terrible time to draw conclusions about it. First and most important, Biden enters office with the country, and world, in crisis. Five hundred thousand Americans will soon have died because of the coronavirus pandemic. In his first days in office, Biden’s most profound contrast with Trump has been to take this seriously, which, remarkably, Trump never did. Biden has already proposed an enormous new coronavirus relief bill of $1.9 trillion, ordered a significant increase in the federal role in vaccine production and distribution, and signed a raft of executive orders to undo many of Trump’s most disruptive policies. This is normal only in the sense that Americans before Trump would expect their Presidents to act in response to major national emergencies, not simply declare that they would magically disappear.
At the moment, however, Trump—and the thorough Trumpification of the Republican Party—remains the major obstacle to Biden achieving any kind of genuine return to the status quo ante-Donald. That, at least, is the current theory of the case in Washington, where—notwithstanding his defeat in November, his Party’s loss of the House and Senate, and his becoming the only President in American history twice impeached—Trump is still considered to have something of a chokehold over the G.O.P.
A few weeks ago, after the Capitol insurrection and Trump’s subsequent impeachment, this seemed debatable. But Republican leaders who castigated Trump for his role in inciting the mob have backed away from their criticism. This week, all but five Republican senators voted for a measure condemning Trump’s upcoming post-Presidential impeachment trial as unconstitutional, and Republican House members who did vote to condemn Trump are experiencing fierce backlash. On Thursday, Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, flew to Florida to make up with the former President. Even though he voted against impeachment, McCarthy had dared to utter a few words of public criticism. Trump was enraged; he called McCarthy a “pussy” and vowed revenge. Trump aides were exultant. “It’s the first solid bit of evidence that Donald Trump is still in charge of the Party,” an adviser told Politico. And, as long as Trump is in charge, it seems safe to say that Biden can forget about normal.
There’s plenty of evidence for this school of thought, given the past four years of Republicans caving to Trump. He remains too popular with the Party’s voters to ignore, and will likely never stop craving the spotlight. The habits of reflexive partisanship—already deep before Trump and now turbocharged by four years of his divisive rule—won’t help, either. At such a fraught moment of change, there’s a comfort in reverting to even the most dysfunctional norm. Already, both parties are comparing the moment to 2009, when Obama’s vow of transformational bipartisanship foundered quickly on Capitol Hill and the current age of one-party executive action began. Democrats and Republicans differ on who’s to blame, of course, but tend to agree about the principal consequence: gridlock, which in many ways continues to this day. Biden’s pledge for “unity” remains elusive enough that a new Democratic senator, John Hickenlooper, of Colorado, likened it to pornography. “I’ll know it when I see it,” he told reporters.
Part of the next few months will be an exercise in understanding which parts of our politics have fundamentally changed and which were specific to Trump’s uniquely polarizing persona. His continued dominance of the G.O.P. might seem like a given now, but it is far from foreordained. Most Presidential losers end up isolated and in retirement. Trump faces the imminent threats of bankruptcy and prosecution. His popularity, already historically low for a President, plunged after the events of January 6th. One distinguishing characteristic of Trump’s four years in office, in fact, was that there was never a day when polls showed him commanding the support of a majority of the country—the first time that has happened in the history of polling. In Biden’s first week, he has shown that does not have to be the case. He starts out, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker, with fifty-four-per-cent approval, an increase from the 51.3 per cent he finished with in the November popular vote.
What was so odd—and deeply unsettling—about public opinion in the Trump era was the extent to which the polls were more or less stable, regardless of the latest Trumpian scandal, outrage, or crisis, seeming to suggest that, with minds entirely made up about him, we had entered a purely tribal moment, in which the link between Trump’s actions and the public holding him responsible for them had been severed. Biden has framed his Presidency as a restoration; one sign of that would be if the polls once again fluctuate up and down, in step with public perceptions of the President’s policies and performance. This is how it used to work. This, in a more functioning democracy, is how it should work. Is it even possible still to imagine a politics that rewards success and punishes failure, that offers at least a simulacrum of accountability?
The conventional wisdom about a new Presidency is almost always wrong. The trick is figuring out how. After 1976, as the historian Rick Perlstein points out in his epic latest work, “Reaganland,” the Republican Party, disgraced by Nixon, was written off for dead, only to rise again four years later and cement control of the White House for more than a decade. In 2001, George W. Bush looked to govern as a centrist, with a domestic agenda focussed on issues such as education reform. Then came 9/11, a trauma that immediately produced a million incorrect takes. On September 12, 2001, there were few who foresaw that the outcome of the devastating Al Qaeda attack would be a disastrous war in Iraq and an ongoing military presence in Afghanistan—which is only winding down now, two decades later.
Donald Trump’s four years of erratic, chaotic, norm-shattering rule—culminating in the most serious attack in our history by a sitting President on the legitimacy of an election—were as serious a national crisis as any in recent American history. The shock of a President who would challenge even the basic precepts of our constitutional order will not fade quickly. The storming of the Capitol was a traumatic event for Washington’s political class, the full effects of which may well take years to become apparent. The pandemic and its attendant economic crisis will end on Biden’s watch, and once they do it’s hard to foresee that the politics of this post-Trump America will resemble anything close to those of a year ago, never mind those of the pre-Trump era. I can imagine Trump as the Republican leader of the next few rage-filled years. But I can just as well imagine him stuck at home alone at Mar-a-Lago, roaring about revenge.
