The past four years of Trump’s presidency have been like living with a drug addict who is deep in their addiction. Anyone who has endured this unfortunate cohabitation knows that each day brings with it a certain unsteadiness that creates its own kind of frantic normalcy. It’s toxic and exhausting and if you stay in it too long, you forget what days were like before it and what they could be after it.
And then Trump lost.
And America now has two responsible parents.
And we will finally get a return to the boredom that we deserve.
And this is a compliment to both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
It’s easy to forget that before Trump, the American government wasn’t primetime viewing—it was the malaise of bureaucracy, and that was a good thing. A really good thing. The slow-turning wheel of government was never meant to be a shitshow. But then white supremacy had to pay America back for eight years of Obama and they elected a WWE reject who turned the office of president into a drug den. Trump made everything from press conferences to social media an exhaustive display of fuckery that America had never seen before and hopefully never sees again. It’s hard to remember Obama’s tan suit being the talk of the town because that seems like eons ago.
With President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, America can expect sensible governing. They can expect guided leadership and a return to the boredom that once ruled the presidency. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be excitement. Surely, Harris will wear something that critics don’t think is flattering or worthy of her vice-presidential status, and that’s not because Harris has bad fashion sense, but because America is fickle and Harris is a Black woman and that means someone with a keyboard will have something to say. They always do.
We’ll wait with bated breath for Biden to flub something in a speech because that’s kind of his thing, and we will pounce because that’s what covering politics is all about. While Trump was great for those of us who covered his antics, even to us he was exhausting, and we live for this level of fuckery.
So, yes, America has righted the ship. And while the next four years, and hopefully, prayerfully, eight to 12 years will be boring, we deserve this. We deserve a return to CNN when they were looking for news to fill up the hour. We deserve to go back to a time when we didn’t know anything about certifying elections or that the white supremacy gang clothing was khakis and polos. We worked for this inside a pandemic. We literally braved it all just to be able to go back to a time when we didn’t have this much government as a part of our everyday lives, and I can’t wait for this level of boredom to return.
I prayed for it. We all did.