Goodbye and Good Riddance to the Trump Era

With less than fifteen hours left until Joe Biden takes the oath of office and Donald Trump reverts back to a private citizen, millions of Americans are counting down the minutes until the end of the long national nightmare begins.  There is much wreckage from the misrule of the Trump/Pence regime to be fixed or reversed, but if nothing else sanity and fact based decisions will be returning to the White House.  Biden plans to sign a barrage of Executive Orders tomorrow to begin the recovery and to reverse horrible policies put in place by the always racists and always homophobic Trump,  With luck, the Biden administration can make sense out of the flawed vaccine rollout of the Trump regime and take major steps to getting Americans vaccinated and the Covid-19 pandemic ended. Another positive is we no longer have the equivalent of a Visigoth in the White House seeking to destroy America's democracy.  A column in the New York Times looks fondly at the end of the foulest presidential regime in the nation's history and also what each of us can do to move the nation forward. Here are excerpts:

To me, the most striking feature of Trump’s presidency was that year after year he kept surprising us on the downside. Year after year he plumbed new depths of norm-busting, lying and soiling the reputations of everyone who entered his orbit. But he never once — not once — surprised us on the upside with an act of kindness, self-criticism or reaching out to opponents.

His character was his destiny, and it became ours, too. Well, I’ve got good news. We can recover, provided that we all — politicians, media, activists — focus on doing what Trump never could: surprising each other on the upside.

Upside surprises are a hugely underrated force in politics and diplomacy. They are what break bonds of pessimism and push out the boundaries of what we think possible. They remind us that the future is not our fate, but a choice — to let the past bury the future or the future bury the past.

[W]e live for surprises on the upside from our leaders.

I have been watching Mitt Romney repeatedly put his oath to defend the Constitution ahead of his party and personal political interests. Along the way, we’ve gotten to know each other. We don’t agree on everything, but there’s mutual respect. Romney recently introduced me for a speech I gave virtually to a bipartisan climate action coalition in Utah. That surprised some people, and maybe made them look at the whole issue differently. It’s surprising what can happen when we surprise for the better.

Liz Cheney just totally surprised me on the upside last week by putting country and Constitution before party and personal ambition and voting to impeach Trump. I knew her when she worked on Middle East democracy issues. Makes me want to reconnect.

Last May, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, the rapper Killer Mike was enlisted by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to help quell the violence in Black neighborhoods. He surprised me when he scolded violent Atlanta protesters . . . .

So, I have two asks of every American: Give Joe Biden a chance to surprise you on the upside and challenge yourself to surprise him.

American businesses need to surprise us by telling Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch that their network fueled the Big Lie that led to the ransacking of the Capitol and they are no longer going to advertise on any show that spreads conspiracy theories. The best news I heard this week is that My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell — an avid Trump backer and advertiser on Fox, who has pressed debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged — said Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Wayfair and other retailers were dropping his products. Good for them.

There is no equivalent on the left to the right-wing white supremacists and other extremists who just ransacked the Capitol. Not even remotely. But liberals would surprise a lot of people on the right, and maybe even get a few to support Biden, if they forcefully rejected political correctness when it stifles dissent and called out not only violence by the police — a huge priority — but also the sources of violence in minority neighborhoods that are terrorizing Black, brown and white residents alike. I see it in my hometown, Minneapolis, every day.

And now that the threat of Trump is gone, all of us in the news business need to get back to separating news from opinions. We need more places where Americans of all political stripes can feel that they’re getting their news straight — without being enraged, divided or woke; leave that for the opinion sections.