The Next Go ’Round

In lieu of a Republican Party platform, the Donald Trump campaign released a list of bullet points for a second-term agenda. My favorite item was just five words long and came under the heading “Eradicate Covid 19: Return to Normal in 2021.”

Does anyone think that after a come-from-behind victory for the ages, we would have normality in view around the time of Trump’s Second Inaugural?

Me neither.

Sure, it’s true that Democrats have taken electoral beatings before, and that they’ve come back more moderate, or at least sounding less hostile. After the stompings Nixon and Reagan put on them, Democrats kept digging up white Southern Baptists to lead the party. George W. Bush’s second electoral victory managed to get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to start talking about Jesus. Democrats can be humbled. In some ways, choosing a dying border-state glad-hander like Joe Biden, who is older than the Baby Boomers, is just a different version of the same strategy: Find a candidate who seems like a cultural non-threat.

But another narrow Trump victory, especially one in which the popular vote goes for Biden, is going to kick off civil unrest that will make this summer look tame. Trump’s opponents will ping-pong even harder between the two fever dreams of the first term. The first, that Trump is a foreign pawn and opposed to everything that makes American great. This charge comes with a complimentary retweet of James Comey standing near the Liberty Bell. The second, that Trump is the final, rotten fruit of a rotten American tree that must be uprooted altogether. This one comes with a retweet of 1619 Project impresario Nikole Hannah Jones explaining that arson isn’t violence.