For the first time in what seems a lifetime it’s possible to peruse the contents of the New York Times without the impression Donald Trump is the only newsworthy item on the face of the earth.
From the very beginning of the soon-to-be-former president’s tumultuous term in office, the Times has brooked no competition in its obsessive coverage of Trump and his administration. It wasn’t rare that you could scan the lineup of columnists on its opinion pages without finding anything other than Trump to read about.
It’s not that the shock Trump brought to the Times’ worldview wasn’t real or substantial. It’s just that he wasn’t the only potential topic worthy of comment on so many of his 1,400-odd days in office. There are entire areas of the globe where people were able to rise with the dawn and ease back into rest that same evening without Trump or his activities meaning a damn thing to them. You’d think a publication as big and qualified as the Times would have managed to scour the universe and find at least one other topic.
Even the worst days of our lives eventually pass, however, and recently the Times has managed to get through whole editions without heart-rending cries of anguish at the unfairness of it all. Not many, but at least they’re trying.
Instead, journalistic normalcy is returning in the discovery that Joe Biden (who was suddenly transformed into Joseph R. Biden Jr. the moment he became president-elect) is not entirely without blemish. This is what we do in pundit-land: beaver away to find fault with the incumbent, so we can get fresh meat to gnaw on at regular intervals. We get bored easily, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Even while Trump continues to insist he won the election while losing by every measure, Biden’s preparations to replace him are coming in for moderate questioning. His choices for important posts have been deemed to resemble old-home week: people he’s known for decades who make him feel comfortable, even though they might not be the spryest codgers on the block. People he knew as pals five or six presidents ago, friends who showed up to lend support when his nomination campaign had him mired in fourth or fifth spot.
Why is he nominating as secretary of defence a career military man despite the deep-rooted convention that a civilian should run the department? Lloyd Austin would be the first Black person to head the department, which is not nothing, but would require a special waiver to take the job over a civilian. Trump got a waiver when he picked Gen. Jim Mattis for his revolving-door cabinet, but since when does Biden want to use Trump as a precedent for anything? John Kerry (special envoy on the environment) and Tom Vilsack (agriculture secretary) may be experienced hands and known quantities, but Vilsack is 70 and Kerry turned 77 on Friday. If you’re the insurgent “progressive” wing of the Democratic party you must have the impression the welcome mat to power still hasn’t been put out for your generation.
Even Biden’s wife is attracting new attention. Someone at the Wall Street Journal wrote that she should stop referring to herself as “Dr. Biden” (she has a doctorate, not a medical degree), which got someone at the Washington Post all upset and hissy.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing. These are manageable issues, things people can discuss in a civilized manner without being termed a loser, a terrorist or an enemy of the people by the White House. Rather than two parallel and competing crises, the U.S. is shifting its attention to the one that is actually killing people. Any day now the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 will pass 300,000, or 100 times greater than the count from the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, and while 9/11 remains universally mourned as a national tragedy, doctors and health authorities are still struggling to convince Americans the pandemic should be taken seriously.
It should get easier to contain the outbreak as people are vaccinated against it. The first U.S. doses were shipped Sunday from a Pfizer plant in Michigan , and even if millions continue to believe vaccination is some kind of weird voodoo dreamed up by a dead president from Venezuela, tens of millions more will be saved a stay in the hospital or a spot in the cemetery. At the very least the people administering the vaccine will have a better chance of getting home healthy.
On Friday the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out Trump’s last-gasp shot at overturning the election. None of the three conservative justices he appointed in the belief they would sit up and bark at his command dissented from the decision. Given the cravenness with which Republicans have acted throughout the post-election farce, it’s reassuring that at least one of the three arms of government delegated power by the constitution remains in functional order.
Trump says he’ll fight on , but short of suing the Supreme Court, his options are sparse. Rudy Giuliani, his one-man lawsuit machine, was hospitalized with COVID virus. William Barr, Trump’s loyalist attorney general, couldn’t scrape up anything to link Joe Biden to the antics of his son Hunter and hand Trump a last-minute opportunity to smear the man who beat him. Barr reportedly hid the fact there was nothing to be found, even as Trump acolytes hollered about yet another massive cover-up.
On Monday the Electoral College officially voted to confirm Biden’s victory. Like it or not, the Trump circus is leaving town. The president won’t say whether he’ll attend the inauguration of his successor on Jan. 20. Doesn’t seem likely he’ll be much missed.
National Post
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