While there are still plenty of mail-in ballots to be counted, the results are clear: I, Joe Biden, am the next President of the United States.
Americans can breathe a sigh of relief: our national nightmare is over. When I take office in January, I will put an end to Trump’s divisiveness and begin the healing process to bring this country back together again. Despite my best intentions, I know the damage Trump has caused will be difficult to repair. As a nation, we’ll need to have long, difficult conversations about how we got to this point, what we can do to prevent the next far-right wannabe-dictator from seizing power, and how we’ll punish Trump and his cronies who have violated our Constitution and democracy. Or, we can just pretend none of this ever happened and let them get away with it.
I know these people deserve prison, but do you seriously want to reckon with everything Trump revealed about the nature of the GOP and American capitalism? My donors and I sure don’t. Look, we can deal with the fact that one of our country’s major political parties is a shade to the right of the Third Reich, or we can just back away from it slowly like we walked in on our parents having sex. Some of these same Republicans are going to work in my administration, after all. Do we really want to impeach ghouls like Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett? Put Mitch McConnell on trial? Give Ivanka’s inevitable MSNBC correspondent’s job to a journalist? I know they say you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, but dammit, Joe Biden has never been a guy who listens when someone tells him no.
There’s no denying that the Trump administration revealed a lot of ugliness in America. As President, I promise to sweep all that ugliness back under the rug. White supremacists will no longer march out in the open. During the Biden administration, those white supremacists will return to the police departments from whence they came. The ICE agents who kidnapped children and locked them in cages will resume their normal ICE duties of kidnapping not as many children and locking them in fewer cages. Consider the Biden administration like Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black. You saw the aliens, and now it’s time to get your memory blanked. Because while there’s a lesson we can learn from the Trump years about how easy it is for a country to fall into fascism, there’s an even greater lesson that none of this ever happened, and I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.
See, America is like a house. While it may have been built on a rotten foundation with shoddy materials, it’s just easier to add on a new patio and hope that’s enough to convince a Chinese business person to buy it off you with cash. When one of your stove burners stops working, you don’t try and fix it or get a new stove, you just stop using that burner. If the water heater bursts, you learn to deal with ice-cold showers. If you find asbestos insulation in your attic, you don’t ask questions like, “How long has this been here? Don’t I have the inalienable right to live in an asbestos-free house? Do the people who built this house even care if I live or die?” No, you crack a window and do all your important breathing outside. The Biden presidency is looking forward AWAY from the asbestos, not backward TOWARD the asbestos!
I’m not saying forgetting these past four years is going to be easy. We’re all going to have to do our part in buying former Trump staffers’ tell-all books, donating to their non-profit foundations, publishing their think tank’s articles uncritically, and whatever else is necessary to launder these maniacs back into society. How are we going to ignore something as big as climate change if we can’t ignore this? We’re Americans – there’s no easily-avoidable disaster we can’t glumly accept!
One of the few bright spots of the Trump years was that so many Americans become radicalized for the first time. They participated in protests, marches, walk-outs, and mutual aid efforts. They learned how Trump was just a symptom, not the cause of America’s woes, and that systemic problems require systemic solutions. I heard over and over how, despite how precarious these past four years felt, ordinary people found hope in fighting for a better world, in connecting with their community and taking some modicum of power back from the billionaires and corporations that have made even the simple act of living day-to-day untenable. I’m asking every American to hold on tightly to that feeling and let it go immediately following my inauguration. Release it from your heart like a pack of white doves and watch it get sucked up into a low-flying 747 jet engine.
Americans can sleep easy knowing that the criminals are no longer in the White House. They’re now back in the streets, running rampant over the private sector, where they belong.