The era of Trump irrelevancy has dawned, and too many people are slow to see the light. No matter what Trump has the nerve to do now, none of it is likely to matter much, since the man has so little real nerve. The presidential election is effectively over, and now we’re going through the formalities. So get Trump out of your head! He had no business being there in the first place.
Two important provisos: (1) Keep an eye on what he and his family steal between now and January. The Biden administration should be prepared to try to recover the millions (or billions) of ill-gotten Trump gains from public pockets. (2) And keep an eye on his destructive appointments and policies. For now, he can do whatever any president could do, but all of it (or most) can be easily reversed soon after January 20. The Biden administration has to have the will and the courage to make the undoing quick and thorough.
And there’s the greater problem: What level of grit do the Biden people have? How clear is their vision? Actually, what IS their vision? Is there any vision? “The soul of America” is not a vision. It’s not even a real thing. It’s feel-good, pious language garbage that takes no one anywhere. The “soul of America” is not a governing principle, it’s a deceitful conceit designed to mislead any observer into imposing any random meaning on value-free rhetoric. But that’s where we are, waiting to see what the next president and his team will do to define their idea of America’s soul.
They’re off to a bad start.
More than a week after Biden’s winning vote-count reached an irreversible (almost surely) level, Biden still hasn’t assumed a presidential demeanor. He IS the President-elect in every known reality. But he’s still acting more like the presidential-wannabe. What are the Biden people thinking, spending time and energy trying to rebut Trump’s various election-fraud claims? Those claims are a house of cards that have begun collapsing from their own insubstantiality. A presidential team would simply ignore them. When reporters ask about them, just ask back: What gives them any credibility? Get Trump out of your head!
The vote fraud scam is just another Trump distraction that draws focus away from the continuing criminality of the Trump administration and its effort to destroy as much of effective government as it can in the time it has left (see provisos above).
The Biden people need a counter-narrative, but they don’t even seem to be thinking in those terms, even though they have an excellent, reality-based counter-narrative staring them in their faces.
That would be voting. That would be the absence of voter fraud.
Right now the Biden transition team is mostly a figment of media imagination rather than an actual, organized, public entity. Transition news is scattershot, usually of unevaluated importance, with no central focus. No incoming president should want two months of political blur, dominated by his opponent, to precede his taking office. No doubt the Biden people know that perfectly well, but they’re still in the fuzzy wuzzy stage of development, and the longer it lasts the harder it will be to cure.
Voting is obviously the thing of the moment, and the Biden people haven’t taken advantage of that. Right now (late, but still not too late), the Biden people should be pushing back with their own narrative centered on having won the national vote by any rational assessment. The Trump administration reports that this “election was the most secure in American history.” There should be a daily Biden election report that covers the latest positive developments, that discusses state issues, and that undermines Trump’s claims, albeit obliquely, by citing facts without reference to Trump himself.
The effect of this Biden effort (should they undertake it) would be like a long-running seminar on a core element of a healthy American democracy (an aspect of its soul, if you will). There seems to be widespread popular ignorance about how our election system works. The Biden Voting Seminar, sustained at least through Congressional certification in January, would be a civics lesson carried into public consciousness by the Trojan Horse of phony controversy. A daily affirmation of specific instances where the system worked might actually have some impact over a two-month span. The credibility of this seminar would rest on its willingness to examine any and every slightly credible claim of irregularity, and even discussing the ones that turned out to be real even though the number of votes at stake was immaterial to the election outcome. By January, this seminar might well persuade most Americans that the integrity of our voting system is real. It might even cut into the impact that twenty years of dishonest Republican claims of voter fraud have had despite their lack of evidence. (Real voter fraud has taken the form of such Republican scams as voter caging, extreme gerrymandering, and voter suppression over the past 20 years).
The moral basis of a serious voting seminar – reinforcing voting integrity – is essentially unassailable, as long as the approach is factual, low key, honest, comprehensive, reality-based, and sustained. And the beauty part of this approach is that it requires no mention of Trump or any of his distractions, except perhaps on occasion, obliquely, to underline their meaninglessness. Structurally, in terms of the election, everything Trump is up to is irrelevant and best expressed by ignoring it. This should be happening now, it should have been happening at least since November 7, and it should continue till the process is complete.
Voting issues reach deep into other areas of serious concern. Voting issues are, among other things, issues of race, issues of economic inequality, and especially issues of truth in media. Biden could, if he would, lay out a new paradigm for both government and media honesty/accuracy/clarity. These are Big Picture issues. There’s little sign of Big Picture thinking among Bidenites, despite their many decent qualities. The assumption seems to be that America’s soul only needs to be restored, which is a mirror image of Trump thinking. Insofar as there is an American soul, it’s steeped in white supremacy and begs for transformation, not restoration.
The reality that the Biden team is not making transformative efforts is a horrible harbinger of future shortcomings. A conscientious continuing voting seminar is relatively easy. How will the Biden folks manage with the hard stuff?