Sorry, there will be no return to normalcy under Joe Biden

As the presidential campaign enters its final phase, one of the messages of the Biden campaign is that putting him, a 47-year veteran of national politics, into the White House will return us to something approaching normal. With Biden in charge, all the Trump craziness will expire, and things will be safe, sane and familiar.

In fact, there’s no chance of this happening. If Biden wins, things won’t go back to “normal.” You probably won’t even hear less from Donald Trump. And in a lot of areas, like foreign policy, it turns out the establishment’s version of normal wasn’t all that normal anyway.

Many of my lefty friends want Biden to win not so much over policy as because they have a visceral reaction to President Donald Trump. They hate the sight of his face, the sound of his voice, even the mention of his name. Electing Biden, they expect, will sweep Trump off the national stage.

But will it?

We are a long way from normalcy

Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.

There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat.

 Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.

And the deep toxicity of national politics, which grew worse after the 2016 election but which has been brewing at least since the turn of the millennium, is not going to go away. In fact, a lot of what we’re hearing from Biden supporters suggests that it will get worse under a Biden administration.

Democrats are already calling for a Biden administration to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices until Democrats have a majority, to pack the Senate by admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and even to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” in which Republicans will be dragged in front of the public and forced to confess the error of their ways. And, of course, abolishing the Electoral College. None of that is normal.

COVID-19 won’t simply disappear

Of course, maybe a “return to normal” really just means an end to worries about the coronavirus, which has in fact turned the world upside down. Biden is running commercials suggesting that tens of thousands of deaths from coronavirus are Trump’s fault.

That’s a pretty weak argument, given that Europe is doing no better than the United States, and arguably is doing worse.

Politicize things as much as you want — and Biden, who accused the president of xenophobia after Trump’s January order banning flights from China, and continued to hold mass rallies for two weeks afterward even after many states declared emergencies, is on thin ice here in claiming Trump acted too slowly — the coronavirus isn’t going away no matter who is in the White House on Jan. 21. It’s an aspect of nature, over which politics has very little influence.

So forget talk of a return to normal under Biden. It’s not going to happen. At most, you can vote for the flavor of abnormal that you prefer. Good luck!