Now put Trump’s foibles in spotlight
Joe Biden’s promise to America was always one of a return to normalcy.
He defeated his rivals — many sharper, more compelling, more telegenic than he at this stage in his career — in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary because voters reasonably decided they would prefer a return to the relative stability of the Obama years over the ephemeral prospect of radical change promised by the likes of Bernie Sanders.
He defeated incumbent Donald Trump in the general election not necessarily because Trump was unhinged — he was — but because hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying unnecessarily from COVID as a direct result of the then president’s botched response. Millions more lost their livelihoods for the same reason.
Americans wanted someone to make the country feel sane again — to put together the broken pieces in a way that made sense.
That hasn’t happened, as evidenced by the fact that the near assassination of a presidential front-runner at a campaign rally less than 10 days ago already feels like a lifetime ago. In the days since much of the world shut down due to a botched Microsoft security update. Amid the chaos, Biden sequestered at home with COVID, announced he would end his reelection campaign less than a month before the Democratic National Convention.
That said, Biden’s lone term will go down as one of the most effective in modern presidential history — he stabilized the nation in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, implemented comprehensive vaccination and economic relief strategies to pull the nation from COVID’s grip, pushed through the world’s most ambitious plan to fight climate change, kept Russian aggression in Ukraine contained and slowly but diligently tamped the resulting inflation.
No, the nation isn’t back to normal. Far from it. But we have Biden to thank for preventing us from plunging into even greater depths.
Yet perception matters. And, despite Biden’s successes, there’s nothing normal about the leader of the free world giving all outward appearances of being a doddering old man. Heralding a regression to the mean was already a Herculean task. After Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump, it felt impossible.
We hope Biden’s exit will now remind the purple parts of the country that remain inexplicably undecided about this election that if it’s normalcy and stability they continue to crave, they won’t find it in a second Trump term.
Even putting aside Trump’s deadly history of policy failure, sexual abuse or his 34 felony convictions — which, to be clear, we shouldn’t — the former president, 78, has been borderline incomprehensible for years.
Consider his ambitious plans for missile defense: “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. … They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom.”
Or his suggestion that injecting disinfectant could fight COVID from within.
Or his mathematically dubious analysis of the job market during his Republican convention coronation speech: “107 percent of jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”
We could go on.
One of the most effective presidents in modern history just dropped his reelection campaign over fears of cognitive decline. Polls suggest this was the correct choice — that Americans in crucial swing states no longer saw Biden as capable of realizing his promise of normalcy.
With Biden’s exit, we hope those same parts of the country will remove the wool from their eyes to see the obvious truth about Trump.