An optimist views the future under Biden
As long as Donald Trump has been president, there has been an anxiety among his critics — inevitability, even — that he would win this year. Or, that if he didn't win, he wouldn't lose, and wouldn't leave.
Call it the emotional weight of his whiplashed presidency. There is surely a psychological complex to explain the gnawing fear that colonizes Trump's America, that the long night will never lift.
Over the last year, you could find the fatalism in dispatches from the front. Forget the Trump loyalists, who never doubted that he would win and still think he has. The culture of doubt flourished among Democrats like orchids in a hothouse.
In June, for example, a veteran journalist went to Detroit, where he interviewed leading grassroots Black officials, elected and unelected. Democrats all, almost all predicted Trump's re-election. Closer to home, the pessimism bubbled in frantic notes from friends and colleagues, finding the dark cloud behind the silver lining: “The Republicans have more money! They're registering more voters! They're knocking on more doors!”
When a rogue poll in January showed Trump at an unprecedented high and the Iowa caucuses were an organizational disaster for the Democrats, cue the crepe-hangers: “A brokered convention! Biden's toast! Bernie can't beat Trump!”
South Carolina and Super Tuesday fixed everything. It made Biden the nominee and Kamala Harris his running mate. Still, the Cassandras wailed: “It's 2016 all over again! Biden going to lose the debate! He's lost it!”
Amid the noise, Biden was rebuilding the
Blue Wall. “The Republicans picked the lock in the Midwest the last time,” said the sagacious Donna Brazile after 2016, and “we aren't going to let them do that again.” That was always the strategy: Hold the states from 2016, reclaim the Midwest. It was always about Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
A month before the election, it got very dark. In The Atlantic, Barton Gellman described Trump's plans to undermine the election. In the New York Times, closer to the election, Ron Suskind wrote of similar schemes to sow chaos. Neither was paranoia or fearmongering; this was solid reporting from two decorated journalists. The danger was a slow-moving constitutional coup d'état.
But it didn't happen. Biden didn't collapse. The system held. The resistance triumphed.
The media exposed Trump's lies, his tax returns, his cruelty and corruption. Public opinion refused to endorse him.
The House of Representatives impeached him. The courts defied him, and in this past month, dismissed his silly lawsuits.
This isn't to say — oh, how foolish — that the republic is in clover. It's in agony. Mitch Mcconnell will try to undo Biden. His Republicans will be led by autocrats and never-enders. Many Americans will not accept Biden's legitimacy.
Still, here's an optimist's view, where optimist doesn't mean quixotic, naive or blind.
In this world, Biden takes office offering calm, compassion and competence. By executive order, he quickly revokes much of Trump's worst polices. He acts decisively on masks and testing, as COVID-19 rages in his first 100 days.
An institutionalist, Biden works with senators Susan Collins and Mitt Romney — independent Republicans beyond Mcconnell's arm-twisting. He reaches agreements on economic relief and infrastructure. He contemplates replacing Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court with a young moderate.
By fall 2021, the vaccine has worked and the economy is humming. As the roaring 1920s followed the Great War and the Great Influenza, the early 2020s will bring relief and confidence.
They call it the Biden Boom. The national mood improves. In the midterm elections of 2022, the Democrats retake the Senate. Abroad, Biden returns to the Paris Agreement, renews the Iran nuclear deal, gets tough on Russia, makes a deal with China. All measures are popular, and so is he.
And Donald Trump? He's indicted in New York, beyond the reach of his self-pardon, and faces years of legal jeopardy. In 2024, at 78, he decides not to run.
Nor does Joe Biden. At the end of a successful term, as expected, he anoints President Harris, and departs to the applause of a grateful nation.