He has gone away. Yes.
Today is Inauguration Day. This afternoon, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States of America. And perhaps more importantly, Donald Trump will no longer be president.
This is what I wrote the day after Trump was elected. While I was clearly pessimistic about what lay ahead, I still held out hope that Trump wouldn’t be as bad as we feared.
Oh how misplaced that hope was. If Trump ever made attempt to unify the country, it was the most token of gestures. Instead, he spent four years playing to the “deplorables” who followed him like a cult.
Significant damage has been done. The courts — including the Supreme Court — have been packed with conservative judges. Measures to help the environment have gone in the wrong direction. Bigots and racists have become empowered. Our national debt has skyrocketed. Our national reputation is in tatters. Over 400,000 people are dead thanks to COVID-19, and thanks to the poor vaccine rollout, that number stands to get higher still.
So yes, the mess is big, deep, and tall. But I do not share the fish’s pessimism. We can fix this. It will take time and effort, but America is not permanently ruined.
For instance, while these past two elections have been divisive, the results of the 1860 election prompted half of the country to secede. (I’ll admit there have been moments when it felt like we weren’t all that far away from that in recent weeks.) If America was able to recover from that, surely we can recover from four years of Donald Trump.
Biden may not prove to be the greatest president in our country’s history, but I have confidence that he’ll be competent. Vaccine distribution will improve. Financial help will be provided to the people who need it. Who knows, we might even get improvements to our health care (Remember when Trump was going to replace the ACA with something better?) and national infrastructure! (Remember all the times it was going to be Infrastructure Week?)
But it isn’t just up to Joe Biden. Thankfully, we’ve (barely) given Democrats control of Congress, so Biden should be able to get some of his agenda accomplished. But government control is fleeting, and the midterm elections are less than two years away.
A valid criticism of liberals like myself is that because Obama was in the White House, we assumed that everything was okay. Meanwhile, Democrats were suffering massive losses at the state and local levels, and we dismissed the possibility that a man like Donald Trump could actually win a presidential election. Despite appearing to be in some disarray at the moment, the Republicans aren’t going to simply go away. We must remain vigilant.
Beyond that, don’t rely too much on politicians to fix everything. We can all do our part to make this country a better place. Stop blaming others for your problems. Stop hating people because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. Be open —although beware the paradox of tolerance— to ideas and viewpoints that may differ from your own. And when reading news, do some critical thinking before deciding on what is fact. Just because it matches your preconceived ideas doesn’t mean its actually true.
We’ve been given an opportunity. America can indeed be made great — better than it ever has been. But it’s up to all of us to make it happen.
