In the course of the one thousand four hundred and fifty-seven terrible and, just as often, terrifying days since the last Presidential election, people began to view the date November 3, 2020, as a distant finish line at the end of an ultramarathon. Runners know that endurance is a matter of setting small, achievable goals, and, against the headwinds in this generally hostile climate, Democrats—and, more broadly, people concerned with democracy—have often seemed to be pacing their strides, counting down the miles to the midterm elections, and then from the midterms to the 2020 election. The congenitally conservative New Hampshire Union Leader, in offering its endorsement of Joe Biden, noted that “Biden may not be the president we want, but in 2020 he is the president we desperately need. He will be a president to bring people together and right the ship of state.” That statement fit into the closing theme of Biden’s campaign: this election is only secondarily about competing policy ideas; it is, fundamentally, a contest between decency and indecency. In his appearances in the closing days of the campaign, Biden has taken to standing before a banner that reads “Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” Normalcy, we’ve come to understand, is on the ballot.
True to form, Donald Trump appears to have unwittingly played into the script that Biden has written for him, barnstorming the country in a spree of indulgence, holding mass rallies amid a pandemic, offering up his people as collateral damage in his drive to maintain power. “We’re rounding the corner,” Trump claims at each stop on his Hot Spot 2020 tour. The fatalities from the coronavirus have dwindled to “almost nothing,” Donald Trump, Jr., lied to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham last week, on a day when more than a thousand Americans succumbed to COVID-19. Trump decried “American carnage,” in his Inaugural Address, but he seeks reëlection while enabling that very thing.
So, it seems that the bizarre, dysfunctional, and dangerous times we live in have been distilled into a morality play, with a cast of three hundred and thirty million people. The disastrous impacts of Trump’s coronavirus denialism are already apparent. Nearly eight months after lockdowns began, hospitals in many places are once again at capacity, and case numbers are spiking like a symptomatic fever. This would be dangerous enough, but we’ve seen the consequences of his other forms of denial come to bear this year: his absurdly agnostic climate-change perspective, while wildfires made the state of California look like the set of an epic disaster movie; an irrational rejection of the importance of the Affordable Care Act, while millions of Americans suffer through the effects of the pandemic; a magical belief that the economy can prosper despite the latter concerns. But there is another form of denial that may be just as crucial to our future. Science is increasingly worried that the virus will become endemic, a permanent part of our lives going forward. We should hold the same concern about the anarchic forces of Trumpism.
All Presidential tickets are alliances of convenience, but that is even more profoundly the case for the Biden-Harris ticket, which has won the support of a broad array of voices, from moderate Republicans to Democratic Socialists. This unlikely coalition is held together by the belief that the former Vice-President and the California senator represent the nation’s best—and likely sole—hope for a return to normalcy. In a scathing speech in Pennsylvania aimed at Trump’s many deficiencies, Barack Obama noted how exhausting it is to have to constantly think about this President and what absurdities he may be up to. Biden, Obama said, would offer a welcome respite from this. But the idea of turning the corner on the volatile contempt that Trump has unleashed is just as unduly optimistic as Trump’s fool notion that the novel coronavirus is going to one day just vanish.
In recent days, the President has downplayed the significance of the plot hatched by a Michigan militia group to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and has said that a caravan of his supporters in pickup trucks that surrounded and seemed to try to obstruct a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a busy Texas highway did nothing wrong. In Fort Worth, on Friday, a group of Trumpists drove through a Black community, in what appeared to be an attempt to intimidate voters. On Sunday, another caravan reportedly drove through the only predominantly minority community in California’s Marin County, just north of San Francisco, shouting racist epithets. There is a troubling question of what Trump might do if he loses the election; the more enduring question concerns what his people will do. Bereft of representation in the White House but still clinging to conspiracy theories—QAnon seems likely to become a more dangerous movement during a Democratic Administration—Trumpists could let their fury explode in any of a thousand ways.
The Texas highway incident was particularly ominous, raising yet again the question of Trump’s most extreme supporters’ willingness to commit acts of violence on his behalf. For eight years, many Americans feared for Barack Obama’s life, simply because he was both a Black man and the President, and it was clear that some portion of the public would never reconcile itself to those two facts. But such is the state of affairs that it now seems only prudent to share some of that concern for an older white man who is the former Vice-President, and who won the nomination, in part, because many Black voters thought that he’d be the Democrat most palatable to white voters.
For all these reasons, the hope is that return-to-normalcy rhetoric is something that Biden says publicly but doesn’t truly believe privately. Sincere belief would ignore not only the lessons that four years of Donald Trump should have taught us but also the lessons that should have been gleaned from Biden’s eight years in the Obama Administration. On issue after issue, Obama sought to carve out a non-ideological middle ground, in order to bring Republicans on board and negotiate deals. And, as Republican intransigence on immigration, climate change, health care, and the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination attest, the G.O.P. was not opposed to Obama’s policy ideas; it was opposed to Obama. Trump made that opposition the central theme of Republican policy.
There is no reason to believe that the situation would change if Biden takes office, and there are many reasons to believe that it would not. For the past four years, people on the left have assailed Republicans for cowering before Trump. In fact, they were cowering before the people behind him. A Republican Party still beholden to that group would reflect its prerogatives. This is not to say that voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will make no difference, but, as with the pandemic, we’ve learned to manage our expectations when people talk about magical cures for complex problems.
It is not an exaggeration to say that our survival depends in some large measure on Donald Trump being defeated in this election. But we should not conflate a Democratic victory with a return to normalcy. It won’t be. And we should recall that normalcy, as we called everything before Trump’s regime, is what got us here in the first place.
