It is an article of faith for many Americans that the Donald Trump years were an aberration and that Joe Biden will usher in something close to normalcy. I’ll take the other side of that bet.
I believe the coming years are going to be at least as tumultuous as the Trump presidency. Although Biden will not directly cause that tumult, his weakness as a leader, of his own party and the nation, will help fuel discord and make it impossible for him to forge anything resembling normalcy.
Most of those who think Biden can wave a magic wand blame Trump alone for the deep polarization gripping America. They’re wrong — Trump was elected precisely because the country already was deeply polarized.
Moreover, while Trump’s personality is highly unorthodox, to say the least, he did not single-handedly set in motion the dangerous levels of strife engulfing our nation. His successful policies on immigration, taxes and the Mideast were fairly conventional by Republican standards.
Instead, the unrest and growing use of violence to achieve political ends are outgrowths of the extreme resistance movement against Trump. He ran as a disrupter, but was a piker compared to those who hated him and were willing to smash every social, political and legal norm to drive him from office.
That resistance was started by Hillary Clinton and holdouts from the 2016 election and spread to Democrats in Congress, especially Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Their refusal to treat Trump as a legitimate president and worthy of their cooperation marks them as early victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
They incited and fanned the flames of the Russia collusion scam and used it, with the help of J. Edgar Comey and other crooked players in the FBI and intelligence agencies, to sabotage the president.
The bid to overturn the 2016 election was the first pandemic to strike America, and the contagion sickened mayors and governors in blue states, the mainstream media, Hollywood, academia, the courts and much of the sports and entertainment world.
The anything-goes madness made it acceptable in many quarters to declare that the president deserved to be assassinated.
The final industry to put its full force against him, the social-media giants, used their monopolies not just to restrict but ultimately to silence the president of the United States. It’s as if Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple stamped the word “cancel” on the White House.
The tech blackout, while largely a response to the Capitol invasion, was the capstone of four years in which unwritten codes of conduct were broken and traditions shattered. The players were different, but the central explanation was always the same: Trump is dangerous, this time is different, we have no choice.
Trump certainly made his share of mistakes, especially during the
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