14 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
1
WILMINGTONREPORT
PARKINGLOT
T
he Wilmington sky was a limit-
less black, and an American flag
that looked forty feet tall was billow-
ing between two construction cranes.
It was Election Night, and Joe Biden
was scheduled to speak in a parking lot
behind the Chase Center. Attendance
inside the lot was invitation-only, and
people were expected to stay in their
cars. They’d been lining up for hours,
presumably keeping warm.
Outside the parking-lot fence and
next to a mini-mall, about thirty jour-
nalists and a ragtag group of citizens
were gathered, shivering, huddled over
smartphones, watching the results come
in and not come in. Von Michael Todd,
a math professor at Delaware Tech,
was wearing a mask bearing Pac-Man’s
workplace, the blue labyrinth. “This is
my city!” he said. “When do we ever
have a Presidency in our city? Where
you can see Biden come out here?” Not
that he hadn’t seen Biden in person be-
fore. He had—at the train station one
day. And he knew where Biden got his
groceries: Janssen’s.
“All celebrations aside,” Todd said,
“we need someone with a plan.” He
enumerated the plans that were needed:
a plan for the virus, a plan for police
to peacefully interact with African-
American men like himself, and a plan
for education in the Covid era. “I’m a
plan person,” he said.
The hours passed with no results.
Outside the fence, people came and
went, but, aside from the journalists,
there were never more than thirty peo-
ple waiting to celebrate the President-
elect in his home town. It did not feel
like a party.
Crystal Adkins, a social worker, and
her daughter Makayla, twenty, had
not left their car. In the driver’s seat,
Crystal was making her way through
some pasta from Target. Makayla was
on her phone. At least sixty million
people had voted for Trump, and this
had rattled them both.“I can’t believethe world right now,” Crystal said. “It
means that everything that happened
in the last four years—hurting people,
the children being taken away from
their parents, the derogatory state-
ments that he’s made about women
and families and people—it all meant
nothing. I mean, who are we? Who
are we now, to want another four years
of this?”
Makayla had been in high school, just
outside of Wilmington, in 2016. “The
day after Trump was elected,” she said,
“some students, and even one teacher,
came to school wearing MAGA stuff. And
I was, like, ‘I thought we were friends,
but I guess we’re not friends.’”
“And it brings me here tonight,”
Crystal said, “because I just want to be
as close as I can to Biden, because we
need him. We just need him.”
An hour passed with no clarity, and
Crystal and Makayla went home. The
journalists packed up; nothing would
be decided that night. The next day
was balmy and bright, and the elec-
tion was trending Biden’s way. An-
other small crowd of locals amassed
at the fence, under the flag, with word
that Biden would make an announce-
ment soon. It was not expected to
be an acceptance speech, but even a
glimpse was enough for Bob and Tri-
cia Beichner, who were sitting on a
curb. Bob’s mouth was hidden behind
a Grateful Dead mask, but his white
Polo sweater and dad jeans hinted at
fiscal conservatism.
“I’ve actually been a lifelong Re-
publican,” he said. “The day that I left
the Republican Party was the day after
the nomination process in 2016.” Bob
had lived in New York when Trump
was a tabloid fixture; he couldn’t be-
lieve he was being taken seriously as a
candidate. “I went to the Delaware
Department of Elections and I changed
my party affiliation.” Since the 2016
election, Bob and Tricia have been
baffled about the national psyche and
about the friends they thought they
knew. “I didn’t know a single soul who
voted for him,” Tricia said. “All my
Facebook friends, from high school,
college, not a peep.” Slowly, though,
she realized that a startling number of
them were Trump supporters. “And
I’m struggling. I’m really struggling
now with friendships.”needs to make it clear that expertise is
invaluable in all realms of government:
the courts, public health, environmen-
tal science, diplomacy, defense, the
economy. In order to repair American
democracy, he also needs to address
the antediluvian mechanism of the
Electoral College and help reform an
unjust system of voting.
T
he prospect of Joe Biden’s elec-
tion is a moment to take stock.
Another four years of Trump’s reck-
lessness would mean the intensifica-
tion of a public-health disaster. It would
mean squandering more time in a fight
against a climate catastrophe that is al-
ready upon us. It would mean that
Trump, an authoritarian by instinct,
would be even more emboldened to
surround himself only with satraps and
advisers willing to do his bidding. It
would mean more attacks on the press,
more assaults on truth itself.
During the 2016 campaign and be-
yond, Obama generally upheld the
tradition of post-Presidential discre-
tion, but he feared the worst and could
not always contain himself. At one
point, he called Tim Kaine, Hillary
Clinton’s running mate, and said, “Tim,
remember, this is no time to be a pur-
ist. You’ve got to keep a fascist out of
the White House.”
Joe Biden is just as much a small-“d”
democrat as he is a big-“D” one. It is,
finally, possible to see an end to a sin-
gularly destructive carnival. As Presi-
dent, Trump never seemed to realize
how much wreckage, political and spir-
itual, he was inflicting on the country.
Nor did he care. For him, the Presi-
dency was a show starring himself, and
everyone had to watch. The job came
with a big house, a motorcade, a fab-
ulous plane, limitless business oppor-
tunities, and, best of all, round-the-
clock media attention. At a rally late
in the campaign, in the Lehigh Val-
ley, in Pennsylvania, he glanced at an
eighteen-wheeler that was parked
nearby. “You think I could hop into
one of them and drive it away?” he
said with a smirk. “I’d love to just drive
the hell out of here. Just get the hell
out of this. I had such a good life. My
life was great.” To the end, it was all
about him.
—David Remnick