12 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
another four would have compounded
the damage immeasurably.
Throughout his term, Trump openly
waged war on democratic institutions
and deployed a politics of conspicuous
cruelty, bigotry, and division. He turned
the Presidency into a reality show of
lurid accusation and preening self-re-
gard. But what finally made him vul-
nerable to defeat was his mishandling
of the coronavirus pandemic, which has
killed nearly a quarter of a million Amer-
icans. His disdain for scientific and med-
ical expertise, his refusal to endorse even
the most rudimentary preventive mea-
sures against the spread of the virus, was,
according to medical experts, responsi-
ble for the needless deaths of tens of
thousands. Perhaps the most emblem-
atic sign of his heedlessness was the
Rose Garden ceremony at which Trump
announced his nomination of Amy
Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court;
within days, it was clear that the cere-
mony, a predominantly mask-free affair,
with people seated in tightly packed
rows, had been a superspreader event.
The pandemic also served to heighten
the difference in character between the
two candidates. For many months,
Trump betrayed little sense of loss.
Fellow-feeling is not in his emotional
vocabulary. At his rallies, he ranged
between flippant and indifferent, un-
willing to acknowledge the gravity of
the pandemic in any recognizably
human way. “We’re rounding the turn!”
he declared again and again, as the death
toll rose higher and a new wave of cases
crested in hundreds of American towns
and cities. For a fleeting moment, when
he was ill himself, Trump pretended to
experience a glimmer of sympathy for
people who had died, been sick, or feared
the virus. That soon passed.
To Biden, loss, and the recovery from
loss, is the very condition of life. As a
young man, he suffered the deaths of
a daughter and his first wife in a car
crash; more recently, his elder son died
of brain cancer. Biden is a man of trans-
parent flaws—regrettable political de-
cisions during his long Senate career, a
speaking style that often tips into be-
wildered verbosity—and yet in his pub-
lic life he rarely fails to project a qual-
ity of empathy. That quality may have
been as essential to his appeal as any
policy proposal.
Trump could never bring himself to
promise an orderly transfer of power.
He now will doubtless cast blame, con-
coct conspiratorial reasons for his down-
fall, and, if past is prologue, compare the
beneficence of his rule to that of Abra-
ham Lincoln. It is hard to imagine him
appearing at Biden’s Inauguration and
behaving with even an ounce of grace.
He knows well what would follow de-
feat, and he cannot bear it: Joe and Jill
Biden will move into the White House,
and he will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, where
he could spend years fending off cred-
itors, prosecutors, the Internal Revenue
Service, and the judgment of history.
Trump might develop a new media ven-
ture. He might even lay plans for a run
in 2024. The Constitution allows it.
But, even if Trump’s career in elec-
tive politics is over, Trumpism will, in
some form, persist. In 2016, he recog-
nized the hollowness of the Republican
establishment and quickly buried
front-runners for the G.O.P.’s nomina-
tion, from Jeb Bush to Marco Rubio.
As President, he made the Party his
own, bending former opponents to his
will and banishing anyone who ques-
tioned his authority, his judgment, or
his sanity. Republican leaders made it
plain that they were willing to ignore
Trump’s antics and abuse so long as they
got what they wanted: the appointment
of right-wing judges and diminished
tax rates for corporations and the wealthy.
His appeal was nearly as frightening to
Republicans in Congress as it was to
those who voted for Biden. Trump has
apparently failed, but it is hard to de-
scribe the election as a wholesale repu-
diation. Tens of millions of Americans
either endorsed his curdled illiberalism,
his politics of resentment and bigotry,
or were at least willing to countenance
it for one reason or another. The future
of Trumpism remains an open question.S
o is the prospect of a Biden Presi-
dency. At first, Biden ran a wobbly
campaign as a centrist, a meliorist, open
to such reforms as an expansion of the
Affordable Care Act and a reassertion
of such international accords as the Iran
nuclear deal and the Paris climate agree-
ment. But, unlike his opponent Bernie
Sanders, Biden would never use “revo-
lution” or “movement” to describe his
intentions. Having spent more thanforty years in Washington, he entered
the field hoping to be a candidate of
restoration, compromise, and reassur-
ance, a return to some indefinable form
of “normal.”
In the early debates and primaries,
Biden stumbled. His opponents high-
lighted his uneven record, his rhetori-
cal blunders, and his age. (Biden, who
will be seventy-eight on November 20th,
would be older coming into the White
House than Ronald Reagan was when
he left it.) His early campaigning did
not inspire confidence. Pundits recalled
how, in 2008, he had scored one per cent
of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and
quickly bowed out. Would the same
happen in 2020? Memories of his per-
formance at the Clarence Thomas con-
firmation hearings and other moments
of misjudgment were a drag on his can-
didacy. His effort seemed tired, with-
out evident purpose. Writing in Buzz-
Feed News at the time, Ben Smith
rightly observed that Biden’s campaign
was “stumbling toward launch with all
the hallmarks of a Jeb!-level catastro-
phe—a path that leads straight down.”
But, after getting buried in Iowa,
New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden
persisted, deploying a steady appeal to
his own ordinariness, a sense of decency.
His message, to a great degree, was that
he’d been Barack Obama’s Vice-Presi-
dent and that he had the best chance
of beating Donald Trump. In South
Carolina, thanks in part to an endorse-
ment from Representative James Cly-
burn, a lingering glamour from his place
in the Obama Administration, and heavy
support from Black voters, he won the
primary. Thereafter, his campaign came
alive. He and Sanders, in particular, con-
tinued to debate the issues, but one
sensed that among all the Democratic
contenders there was an underlying pri-
ority—the need to deny Trump a sec-
ond term.
On April 8th, after suffering a string
of primary defeats, Sanders suspended
his campaign. Calling Biden “a decent
man,” Sanders declared that he had
won the ideological argument on cli-
mate change, the minimum wage, and
many other issues. And, in some ways,
he was right. He had hardly converted
Biden to democratic socialism, but he
had at least pushed him in the direc-
tion of greater ambition. Biden, who