Drew Magary
Trump Is Not a Cosmic 404 Error
In his debut GEN column, Drew Magary implores Biden and other moderate Democrats to wake up and smell the permanent damage
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There’s no way out of this. I am like many of you in that I would like Donald Trump to disappear forever so that I can finally fucking exhale and never have to think about his dumpy ass ever again. His family, too. But it’s too late for that now.
There’s gonna be an election in 2020, and while you could easily categorize the current tussle between Democratic candidates as a battle between middle-of-the-road capitalists and more progressive social democrats, there is a more subtle-but-pronounced fracture emerging into view: between candidates who are offering real ideas and candidates whose core message is, “Let’s just get rid of Trump and things will go back to normal.” Leading the latter pack is, naturally, Joe Biden, who hasn’t had a new idea since he decided black kids shouldn’t get bused to better schools:
“With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks [Republicans] know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”
This is not a new message from Biden. This is his normal. As Nick Visser reported over at HuffPost, Biden tooted his horn about Republicans having a whole Scrooge-on-Christmas-morning epiphany back in 2012 as well. SURPRISE… They had no such epiphany. Quite the contrary. Biden has spent this new election cycle selling people on the idea that if we simply get rid of Trump, everyone will get along again and we’ll be fine. That’s an appealing thought, one that’s rooted in superficial truths (people out there can be genuinely nice and friendly sometimes!) and one that plays directly into the hands of a political media that thinks the mythical aura of “electability” is the only thing that makes candidates electable.
All Trump did was give Republicans a permission slip to fully unleash their conservative id, which was always rotten in its bones.
Biden’s is a promise of comfort via stasis, and it’s an effective (though hollow) one because certain…
