By Eugene Robinson / Washington Post / Jan. 19, 2021
On Wednesday, the nation will have a president who would never summon thousands of his followers to Washington, whip them into a frenzy with lies and then aim them at the Capitol.
We will have a president who sees the unimaginable and unacceptable national tragedy in every one of the nearly 400,000 Americans who have died from covid-19, rather than lamenting the calamity only as an unfair stain on his precious “brand.”
And we will have a president who, I am confident, won’t seriously inquire about buying Greenland.
The moment Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris are sworn in as president and vice president the world becomes a better and brighter place. Their presence will not magically dissipate the pandemic, the economic devastation that follows from it, and the bizarre and poisonous conspiracy theories that have run wild for the past four years. But at last, we will have a commander in chief who wants to do the job and who works to make everything better. We must be realistic about the tasks before them and patient at a moment when our fortitude has already been sorely tested. But there are real reasons to have hope that Biden and Harris are up to the job.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is such a human weathervane that it is hard to take seriously anything he says, but one of his recent pronouncements is worth noting: Donald Trump, he asserted, was a “consequential” president.
That is objectively true. The Trump years were terribly consequential — in all the wrong ways.
We have endured what felt like a 48-month-long, nonstop assault by an assailant who displays toxic malice and slapstick incompetence in roughly equal measure. His one political talent is identifying the cracks in our society and pile-driving wedges into them, turning them into canyons. His narcissism is so vast and absolute that it should be analyzed in psychology textbooks. His love of conspiracy theories and need to be surrounded by fawning sycophants made his administration an unprecedented gusher of brazen lies.
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