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Biden Must Help Us Learn the Truth About These Last Four Years
It’s time the country got a dose of reality
As the Trump presidency staggers toward its conclusion, the White House is still engaging in a blitz campaign of malfeasance. The president is inventing wild and dangerous allegations about voter fraud. Bill Barr is executing as many people as he can, proposing to carry out death sentences during a presidential transition for the first time since 1889. Mike Pompeo, meanwhile, is proposing to flood the Middle East with new weapons, fast-tracking $23 billion in advanced weapons to the United Arab Emirates, potentially transforming the balance of power of the region.
If anything, the month since the election has shown us that the Trump administration is taking their electoral defeat as a reason to ramp up their misconduct, rather than gracefully step aside.
But come January 20, Joe Biden will be in the Oval Office. The 46th president will have both the authority and the ethical mandate to pursue the truth around what we’ve all endured over these last four years. I don’t know if the divisions sundering America are healable, but only if he commits himself to a cold, hard dose of truth will he have a shot at stanching the bleeding. Otherwise, the nation will further bifurcate into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and the optimal role of government, but into ones that have entirely different understandings of reality. Too many folks have already gone far down that track, but we still have a chance to fight back.
Starting with arguably the most obvious instance of his grift, Donald Trump has already raised over $170 million based on his false allegations of voter fraud. Where is that money going? We’re only just now learning about the alleged misuse of inauguration funds from the first day of the Trump administration; there’s no reason to think these last days will feature more propriety. Audit every penny.
We also remain in the midst of the greatest public health crisis in at least a century. In the spring, the U.S. became the global epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic, and although other regions now rival us as disaster cases, it’s not because we’re doing better. We owe it to the hundreds of thousands of dead to understand how it went so poorly…
