Team Good Guys

Pareene.

But that sense of paralysis—of not knowing how or whether to criticize the president for not taking the warning signs seriously enough back when he could have limited the spread of the coronavirus—is also the inevitable result of decades of capitulation and learned helplessness. A generation of Democrats have ceded ground to the other side at every crisis point, somehow coming to believe it would be either gauche or counterproductive to try to take advantage of one.

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The Biden campaign was premised on Trump’s special unsuitability for the job and Biden’s supposed special fitness to put us back on our former track. There were no larger issues at play. Now, instead of spending every day in an empty Target parking lot demanding to know where the tests Trump promised weeks ago are, Joe Biden is (I am not making this up) planning to try to call the president to give him some leadership tips.

Before he faced a truly national crisis, Trump was, to Joe Biden, a “threat to this nation … unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.” Now that he’s simply another incompetent Republican president whose inept disaster preparedness and response will kill untold thousands, we have, apparently, the promised return to normalcy.