On Saturday, the Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Full stop.
I didn’t think this country would make it to a 46th president. For months I’ve been convinced that Trump would steal the election by any means possible, even mass arrests of Democratic officials. I thought recent spikes in COVID-19 would provide an excuse to strategically close polling stations. I thought Texas-style vote suppression would happen in Arizona and Georgia. I thought William Barr would make like Jehovah and smite Trump’s enemies.
None of these things happened. While it is clear that we’ll have recounts and ballot challenges, it’s also clear that the Trump campaign will ask the courts to step into some slimy territory, and the courts, including the highest one, will not want to smite Trump’s enemies if it’s going to ruin their shoes.
There’s been a dawning realization among the judiciary that credibility has become scarce and valuable. It’s a thing to hold onto if you’ve got it, and that gives judges, no matter their partisan leanings, a handy excuse to rule based on facts and simple justice. Such rulings will not be friendly territory for the convoluted technical challenges contained in the Trump campaign’s filings.
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I still think we could have mass arrests of Democratic officials. The last century has been full of arrests and massacres and civil wars when an authoritarian leader didn’t like the outcome of an election. We all know it can happen. Most of us, even Republicans, don’t want it to happen.
And before it can happen here, a lot of people who have sworn to defend the Constitution will: a) have to violate their oath, or b) ignore the down-the-line consequences of far-out-on-a-limb rationalizations that they are defending the Constitution, or c) believe in the absolute Constitution-transcending goodness of Donald Trump and the corresponding evil of Joe Biden.
Sandra Day O’Connor is on record as regretting her vote, as a Supreme Court Justice, that put George W. Bush in the White House and enabled the endless and futile Afghan and Iraq Wars. At the moment, Chief Justice John Roberts is still dealing with Bush v. Gore, in the form of messy partisan expectations that the Supreme Court will decide the 2020 election. There’s no doubt that he views O’Connor’s regret as a cautionary example.
I think Roberts will oppose putting any Trump campaign litigation on the docket, no matter how hard Alito or Thomas lobby for it. Barrett, the newest Justice, may have the common sense and the sense of self-preservation to recuse herself from any decision having to do with Donald Trump. If she doesn’t, I hope Roberts will appeal to her sense of institutional preservation.
(As an aside, if Stalin were alive today, he’d be saying things like, “How many divisions does the Supreme Court have?” Roberts is smart enough to know that the only power the Court will have in the future lies in the integrity of the justice it dispenses, and an intact country to dispense it in.)
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I was sure Trump was going to get elected the first time. I was also sure he wasn’t going to last a year in office, because it wasn’t hard to spot him as a serial liar and, after Nixon, I didn’t think that people, even Republicans, would tolerate a serial liar as President. I regret being right on the former, and wrong on the latter.
Republicans and the rest of the American people have a much higher tolerance for lies and the liars who tell them than I thought they did. Possibly that’s because a lot of voters don’t remember Nixon, just like voters of my generation had little memory of Warren Harding’s administration trying to steal the country’s strategic oil reserve. (If you want to know more, type “Teapot Dome Scandal” into your search engine. It will make you realize that executive branch lies didn’t start with Nixon, something I naively believed in 1968.)
I have realized that a low tolerance for lies and liars is not something I have in common with the average Trump voter, who might say that lies are what politicians do in order to be politicians. I do believe that some politicians do tell the truth, or try to. I fervently hope that Joe Biden, whatever lies he may have told in the past, has become one of them.
We need someone who won’t lie, no matter how much it hurts, because to keep this country intact, we need to have a president we all can trust.
I’ve been using a simple litmus test for Trump for a long time, which comes not from my experience as a writer but from my years of building fence, digging ditch, and pouring concrete. It’s this: You have two guys on your crew, and one of them is honest and one of them is a bullshitter. You’ve got fifty feet of ditch to dig, a quarter-mile of fence to build, and you have to set up forms for somebody’s basement. Which guy do you want to work with?
I know a lot of fence builders and ditch diggers and cement workers voted for Trump. But if Trump had been hired on any construction job where I’ve ever worked, he would have been gone after his first shift. The whole crew would have been happy about it.
Blue-collar Trump voters should recognize the obvious: the President of the United States is on their crew, and they have to depend on his skills every day. He has to see what needs to be done, and then he has to do it. If somebody’s sick, he has to fill in. If something goes wrong, he has to know how to set things right. If somebody’s reading the blueprints wrong, he has to spot the mistake before a whole week’s work is lost. Believe me, this sort of thing can happen even when you’re digging ditch.
We demand this sort of competence of blue-collar workers every day. Why don’t we demand it of a president?
Almost nobody in this country sees themselves as working on a giant construction project. But on our good days, that’s what we’re all doing, and the good parts of our history were times when most Americans saw things that way.
I don’t think many people, even in this election, viewed Donald Trump as someone helping them get their job done. I do think they saw him as someone able to punish the people on the other side, simply by his stinky presence in the Oval Office. It was important enough to own the liberals that half the country happily attempted the reinstallation of a bullshitter-in-chief. If Trump’s policies threatened to make everybody miserable, at least the other side was going to be more miserable.
The trouble is, these same people are now fearing that it’s their turn to be the more miserable ones. They’re angry and they’re afraid to have Joe Biden as president, because since they were small, they’ve believed the one great purpose of life is to get even.
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I try to tell the truth, but it’s not easily told. Over years of teaching fiction workshops, I’ve told my students that the truth counts, even in fiction. “Don’t tell bullshit stories,” I’ve said. “Do the work. Invent the truth.”
As you might expect, getting across the subtleties of that idea took up a semester or two. But there are ways of telling truths with fiction.
Here’s a story: Jesus encounters a madman who is possessed by demons. Jesus casts the demons out of the man and into a herd of two thousand Gadarene swine, who then run off a cliff into the sea, where they drown. The man is suddenly sane. He no longer has a problem with demons, and, since the story is set in pre-Catholic days, he’s safe from relapsing while trying to understand the Trinity. The unfortunate Gadarene who owned the herd of swine does have a problem with demons, especially if he’s mortgaged his farm for a bunch of piglets.
I didn’t make this story up. Jesus did, or Luke or Matthew or Mark. Even so, it is packed with truth:
a) Jesus is correct. He can cure your crazy by moving your demons elsewhere, like any good family therapist. b) Marx is correct. Jesus believed that private property is a crime. c) Ayn Rand is correct. Jesus, being Jesus, is the sole owner of all the swine in the universe, and he can do what he wants with his private property, even just to make a point about his divinity. d) Jehovah (remember Jehovah?) is correct. Swine are unclean. The demons were part of Jesus’s cleanup crew. e) Satan is correct. Herd animals can be stampeded over cliffs if you get the big ones started in the right direction. Demons don’t need to possess every swine, they just have to possess the head pig, his chief of staff, his attorney general, his majority leader in the Senate and maybe his personal lawyer. In a porcine hierarchy, a few demons can go a long way.
“There are contradictory truths in every story, even the story of your life,” I would tell my students, were I still teaching workshops. “If all truths were consistent with each other, telling them would be a lot easier, and so would pig farming. So would living your life. But picking out the highest truth requires an acute critical intelligence. Some stories are truer than others.”
Write that down.
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Here’s an undeniable truth: Donald Trump and Joseph Biden are both deeply damaged human beings. Biden has been repeatedly torn apart by deep personal grief. He’s lost a wife and daughter and a son and has another son who is a recovering addict. Life has, on occasion, completely wrecked him. Parts of him, I am sure, will never recover. But enough of him has recovered to win the presidency and speak to the country about what it means to have deep unhealed wounds.
I’ve been thinking about Joe Biden’s grief a lot lately, because I’ve long thought—unscientifically—that grief is the cause of Alzheimer’s. The Trump campaign has claimed, since Biden became the Democratic nominee, that he’s an Alzheimer’s victim.
After listening to his speech Saturday evening, I don’t think that’s the case. There’s still an intelligent, living, breathing person in Joe Biden. He has a long history of being flattened by grief, and a long history of picking himself up and dusting himself off and getting on with life. He may not always be articulate, but he’s as skilled in the language of empathy and compassion as anyone I know. That’s what Joe Biden has made of the tragedy life has handed him.
With that ability, I think he’ll make this country into a more emotionally intelligent place.
Trump’s life is just as tragic, but long ago he chose to deny any grief or loss. It’s what comes of being born into a family where a very hard game was being played. The slightest infraction was punishable by death, which was the fate of Trump’s older brother Fred, whose only crime was not wanting to play the game. Early on, Trump learned that he had to be a designated winner, because he had seen what happened to designated losers.
Biden was lucky that he was an adult when tragedy struck. He was able to bring an adult stoicism to grief, put words to it and go on. One of the few gifts that grief leaves behind is empathy, and over time empathy makes you a stronger and more complete and less alone person.
Whatever chance Trump had for personhood was wrecked before he was born. That’s what a toxic family will do to you. His grief hasn’t gone away because he never allowed himself to feel it.
It’s hollowed him from the inside. What’s left in there is sick and lonely and stunted, and from the looks of things, demented. Refusing to deal with grief doesn’t mean it won’t eventually deal with you.
Trump is equating losing with death these days. I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t do to win this election, even now that he’s lost it. That’s why I won’t be sure that Biden is in the White House until Trump has gone into exile or has died or occupies Rush Limbaugh’s soon-to-be-empty chair. Barring a judicial coup, those look like his February choices. What is not possible is that he’ll have a long and honored career building houses for Habitat for Humanity.
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Julie and I had a small celebration once the election was finally called for Biden. We opened a bottle of wine. We listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which we rechristened Ode to Joe for the occasion. We wished Joe Biden luck. He’ll need a bunch of it.
We hope that the next four years will see him begin to reconcile the two warring sides of America. Each half of the country wants to punish the other half. It’s become more important for most people to have an enemy they can hate than to grieve for what they’ve lost. Biden might have the moral authority and the vocabulary to show us a better way.
It’s an odd thing to wish for, but we hope that Joe Biden will be able to teach us the language of grief. Awful things have happened to us in this century, and we need to know how to see them, name them, fully accept that they’ve happened, and get to work on fixing them. It’s the only way we can forestall the greater griefs that will forever creep up on our blind sides.