Normalcy

Donald Trump is not a complex person. He did not become a politician because he has political goals, let alone ideas to transform society. He only has personal objectives. He likes to be the center of attention and make as much money as possible. This has happened before and it will happen again. It is happening even now; he just might be smarter at disguising it. The new strategy of the American right, nonetheless, is to give Trump what is his; they praise him to divert his attention, in order to conduct politics as usual without Trump weighing them down.

This is actually a refreshing change of pace compared to the fact that the defeated president and his feverish followers appeared to be a creeping, uncontrollable and deadly threat to democracy not long ago. Behold, the Democrats didn’t steal the election in liberal-governed Virginia, even though only 40,000-50,000 votes needed to be changed in the voting machines (which everyone knows are sometimes manipulated by Hugo Chavez and Italian satellites). But they were not, so QAnon followers are now forced to turn to the conspiracy that President John F. Kennedy’s son (John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a 1999 plane crash) is secretly alive and will be Trump’s vice presidential running mate in 2024.

It’s an exciting thing to be a lunatic. So can a seemingly sleepy old man compete with this, a man who constantly promotes the tedious argument that cooperation and compromise will improve America? Joe Biden’s agenda clearly suffered a serious defeat as a result of Tuesday’s elections, even though the results were predictable. Virginia again voted for an outcome that ran counter to previous year’s presidential election. From this, the president concluded that cooperation and compromise is what’s needed, especially in his own party, since you cannot really count on the Republicans. Perhaps even this is not certain, as some right-wing politicians suddenly supported voting rights laws that were believed to be dead, for example. With the end of the threat from Trump, maybe a new era of normalcy is coming — at least in America.