Leaving the White House will be the end of Trump

There seems to be more talk these days about how Donald Trump is going to leave town than there is about how Joe Biden will arrive.

Biden, it is said, will take the same train he took almost every day to his job in the U.S. Senate, beginning when he was tragically widowed and lost his daughter in a car accident. He commuted so he could raise his boys. Wilmington is where he is working now, and the traveling press will no doubt be in the cars in front and back, along with the Secret Service, to make sure his journey ends safely.

Trump, if rumors are to be believed, will also leave the way he came, with as much noise, attention and fanfare as a traditionally quiet departure can muster: Marine One, honor guards, salutes — who knows. And a final middle finger to the bureaucrats who keep insisting he not use the White House for partisan purposes.

There will a be a traveling pool of reporters with him for no other reason than they always have to be there in case he dies. But the rest of the press — say, more than 98% — and the eyes of the world will be thousands of miles away participating in what is the most sacred moment of a democracy: the peaceful transfer of power.

We are used to seeing grace in this minute. We are used to seeing the outgoing president wishing his successor well and meaning it, because these are men who love their country above all, and women who understand that their husbands’ sacrifice will weigh on them. And yet they shine, with love of country and the unbelievable good fortune that has bestowed on them the charge to guide our destiny. How much we need them.

Trump and Miss America (Melania Trump certainly has a future as a pageant judge or a coach in faking it on reality TV) will be bounding up the stairs at a half-full hangar somewhere, with cops in masks and MAGA-hat wearers without masks, with tough cowboys who think themselves no match for a virus that will shut down their organs, all loudly cheering his condemnation of democracy.