Despite the electorate’s widely noted, deep-seated wariness at the inevitability of a 2020-election rematch, there has been something weird going on this election season—and it’s not just the despair of two historically unpopular candidates sailing through their parties’ nominating contests. Yes, the public is dreading the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump— but … does it really feel like a rematch? What is deeply weirding me out this year is not that 2020 seems to be happening again. It’s that is has been feeling like 2020 never happened at all.
In a sense, that’s understandable. It was a year of mass death, fear, trauma, isolation, grief, institutional collapse, uncertainty, desperation—and it created something of an overall unsteadiness, a loss of sense of time and purpose and reality. No part of the engine of modern life was unaffected; everyone, up to those highest in power, was adjusting to a hundred simultaneous shocks in real time. No one wants to reflect on such a harrowing time, especially when there are so many new problems to contemplate.
But that’s the thing—so many of the awful developments, so much of the malaise we’re experiencing now, have everything to do with what 2020 wrought, even beyond the occurrence of a mere once-in-a-century pandemic. From the child care crisis to the fights over what’s taught in schools, from the rise in hate crimes and street violence to the clashes over police brutality, from the Supreme Court that seemed dead set on ruling against the public’s wishes to the debates over forgiving student debt—it feels like we started so many conversations in 2020 and have not figured out the ways to finish them.
It’s undeniable that, much as the post-9/11 age defined American politics and culture up until COVID, the disease and its associated memories have cast a shadow on everything after. Even though the majority of Americans, and their government, appear to have moved on from the illness, we’re not yet free from its repercussions.
And while there are a zillion individual prescriptions we could make for each individual crisis the pandemic wrought or exposed, the overarching feeling I get is this: As we gear up for another election cycle in which we normally talk about how we’re doing compared with four years ago, we’re not even willing to remember where, exactly, we were four years ago. Many don’t want to go back to that, understandably. But it’s worth remembering that leaving behind the anti-democratic disasters of the George W. Bush administration, without taking proper stock or reckoning, did nothing to heal that era’s harms and rifts. Such willful forgetfulness will not help us now, either, in the midst of another paradigm shift.
It’s imperative to remember exactly how 2020 felt. If the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency felt like a ticktock of nonstop alarm and horror, the final year—2020—put that into hyperspeed. It seemed like the strange and frankly unbelievable conclusion of what so many people had been screaming about—an unending spate of deaths, community devastation, anti-Asian hate crimes, state violence against protesters, wholesale societal disruption. All of that with the knowledge that no one competent would be doing anything about any of this.
There he was, the man who had once stood on a White House balcony and looked directly at the sun during an eclipse, now tasked with getting us through a public health crisis the likes of which no one had ever experienced. As he instructed us to put bleach into our bodies, traumatized newcomers to the #resistance joined activists who’d spent the prior years agitating against Trump in trying to kick the president out, hopefully once and for all, as the scale of his COVID mismanagement became clear.
Indeed, when Biden entered office, the horror that had preceded him gave him the exact playbook he needed. And so Biden promised to be the opposite of Trump—a quiet steward of normalcy and exemplar of good governance over exhausting chaos, one who would likely serve as a transitional president at best.
The problem was, the kind of madcap, exhausting political engagement that Trump brought to the fore does not yield to a void. Biden’s choice to not emphasize his presence has, consequentially, made him the least culturally relevant president of my lifetime, a chief executive with no definitional stamp on the zeitgeist.
Clinton was a youthful huckster with an eye to the future, Bush was a high-riding cowboy with a cross, Obama was a hip and clearheaded rouser of hope, Trump was the reality TV star whose absurd tweets dominated our news cycles. Biden … did little to shift the nation’s mood from its Trumpian malaise. While the president and his party took substantive early action on vaccination, COVID aid, economic rejuvenation, and slashing child poverty, he did little to, well, actually tout what he pulled off there, slinking away from media appearances, press conferences, and controversial tweets. He may have granted us another round of direct checks, but voters still associate Trump with the “stimmies”—because the Donald made that whole show of adding his signature to each check.
What’s more, once things started to go back to “normal” from peak COVID, Biden did little to message on next steps. There was just a steady drip of developments for those still paying rapt attention: new guidelines, new economic conditions, and new public health officials in charge. But there wasn’t as much reason to keep paying such obsessive attention, and anyway, people were burning out after years of unending bad news and grieving. The lessons of the COVID crisis fell by the wayside. After years of death, bitterness, and conspiracy, the government’s weird, inconsistent messaging around the virus’s wane hardly provided comfort, or closure; it simply fueled more confusion around everything, whether we were talking about the economy or whether it was safe to gather in big crowds.
And then a bunch of international crises escalated, some of it thanks to Biden’s own actions (the overdue yet chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, the ravaging of Gaza) and some of it out of his hands (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a resulting spike in global inflation). And with Trump confining his most outrageous statements to a social network very few non-MAGA people use, it’s not a shock that some have now suppressed recollections of the time every tweet of his led to some horrific news. Nor is it surprising that Trump’s latest flirtations with fascism have failed to break through.
But where Biden has so far missed the mark, I think, is not in simply moving on from the pandemic itself—but in moving on from the pain of the pandemic and its myriad effects. Yet I think his State of the Union address showed he’s beginning to understand that—and trying to fix it.
A key factor in Biden’s 2020 appeal was his keen empathy for those who’ve suffered loss, which stemmed in no small part from his own tragic family backstory (to which he alluded in his speech). The prevailing concerns over Biden’s old age and frequent gaffes were no less prominent in the 2020 election cycle—he just had a more substantive case for becoming commander in chief, thanks to fond memories of his vice presidency and exhaustion with Trump’s reign. What made Biden’s best campaign moments so powerful was his ability to telegraph an understanding of the inconceivable tragedies that had befallen Americans throughout the past year, whether their friends and loved ones had died from COVID, suffered police brutality, or endured mass shootings, extreme weather, or crushing poverty.
When he took the helm, Biden seemed eager to take appropriate action on all those counts. He was also ready to dive into addressing democratic crises stemming from the weakening of voting rights and the judicial activism of a far-right Supreme Court. Of course, such ambitions were not only obstructed by Republicans and “centrist” Democrats, but also by conservative jurists themselves, who scuttled his plans for durable anti-COVID protections and financial relief for debt-strapped, underemployed college students. (On the latter, at least, the president appears to have made up some ground.)
Oh yeah, and also? Those jurists toppled Roe v. Wade, inciting fury from a majority of Americans that has never been properly echoed by the president himself. And they were able to thanks to another 2020 tragedy: the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Yet not only has the administration constantly waffled on the whole nullification-of-basic-reproductive-rights thing—it hasn’t made any serious plans (or given sufficient public rhetoric) to counter subsequent court attacks on birth control and contraception. Right-wing courts know Biden has appointed lots of judges, but that isn’t enough to correct the problem. And since he won’t address the lawlessness of their jurisprudence, they can probably get away with whatever they want.
More to the point, it’s not difficult to understand why Biden is doing poorly with young voters and voters of color—even if you ignore the mass outrage over his approach to Gaza. Again: For months, millions of Americans took to the streets to ask that this country take itself to serious task for the racial injustices that remain all too deeply embedded in our democracy. Yet there was never—never—an actual such reckoning, except one limp, still-unpassed police reform bill named for George Floyd. (And a surreal photo-op with a bunch of white politicians wearing kente cloths and kneeling. Remember that? That was four years ago!)
Rather, we’ve seen a mass dismissal of the necessity to change anything about how modern policing works, right-wing panic over a supposed specter of “woke indoctrination” in schools, and outsize backlash to whatever weak efforts at diversity promotion do exist. The effort to erase what that summer represented continues apace, all the way back to cocked-up “investigations” in right-wing media attempting to exonerate Floyd’s convicted killer. On top of Biden’s feckless stance toward Gaza’s dead, when he could plausibly end the slaughter with just a phone call—why wouldn’t young voters of color be disillusioned?
2020 was the year so many Americans realized the way their country operated was a sham—yet four years later, barely anything seems to have changed. We’ve been able to exit our homes thanks to mass vaccination—but even the promise of those vaccines didn’t quite meet people’s expectations, as the virus persists and we remain puzzled about its current effects, let alone how the world is supposed to operate in recovery mode. No wonder people feel down about the government.
So what can Biden do about that?
It’s unfair to expect him to have addressed everything after just a few years in office, not least considering his historic achievements in climate, infrastructure, and gun control legislation. But it’s another thing for Biden himself to allow still-smarting pain points to fall by the wayside. An unfortunate result of his publicly muted presidency is that even close politics watchers don’t know what the hell Biden is thinking about any of the still-hot topics from that year. So, for the masses who don’t follow as closely—in line with, well, the Biden presidency’s intended effect—it’s easy to assume he doesn’t give a shit.
Here is what he can be expected to do: Acknowledge that the hurt of 2020 lingers on. Empathize with those who aren’t seeing better tidings despite his administration’s sunny, devil-may-care outlook. Emphasize that there’s still much, so much, to be done—and he can do it, if given another chance. And show some righteous anger, some passionate rage at those who really are responsible for trashing our democracy, our basic rights, and leaving the country in this lurch.
The good news is that the State of the Union showed some signs he’s finally, belatedly leaning into this direction—and it could well pay off. The president, with a force and passion that seem to otherwise elude his rare public addresses, took on the trauma of 2020 and the perils of forgetting what happened:
America cannot go back. I am here tonight to show the way forward. Because I know how far we’ve come. Four years ago next week, before I came to office, our country was hit by the worst pandemic and the worst economic crisis in a century. Remember the fear. Record job losses. Remember the spike in crime. And the murder rate. A raging virus that would take more than 1 million American lives and leave millions of loved ones behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness. A president, my predecessor, who failed the most basic duty. Any president owes the American people the duty to care. That is unforgivable. I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history. And we have. It doesn’t make the news but in thousands of cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told. So let’s tell that story here and now. …
There are forces taking us back in time. Voter suppression. Election subversion. Unlimited dark money. Extreme gerrymandering. John Lewis was a great friend to many of us here. But if you truly want to honor him and all the heroes who marched with him, then it’s time for more than just talk. Pass and send me the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act! And stop denying another core value of America: our diversity across American life. Banning books, it’s wrong! Instead of erasing history, let’s make history!
On top of these welcome sentiments—of which the majority of SOTU viewers and donors appeared to approve—Biden finally took the time to address, with a plainspoken clarity, the “heartbreaking” plight of the Palestinians, Republican attacks on reproductive rights, the post-COVID period of higher prices, and Trump’s “demonization” of immigrants and separation of their families.
It’s not enough, and Biden could go much further on his commitment to Middle Eastern peace, his contrasts with Trump on immigration (perhaps by forgoing the term illegals), and the obstruction of the “racial reckoning” that arose after George Floyd’s murder. And in a moment when Americans’ perception has diverged from traditional economic indicators—another consequence of 2020—it’s hardly satisfying to hear emphases of good economic news. But the address was a promising start, not least in reminding the American people of what a nightmare the Trump era truly was. That’s something the populace can’t afford to bury—especially if the dire warnings on the danger of a Trump reelection are to be heeded.
Biden needs to persist in the energy and emotion that became the key takeaway of his speech—not least since only a small percentage of Americans watch that yearly address. More folks want to hear from their president, especially about the traumas still afflicting them. This should be the springboard for a new era of Biden campaigning.
I can’t pretend to know exactly what would improve Biden’s polls, and I’m not suggesting he offer some Jimmy Carter–style “malaise” speech. What I can suggest is that Biden should keep stating publicly to the American people, going back to that famed place of empathy, that he understands why we’re still not in normal times. And to go back to the emotions that powered his 2020 campaign launch, like his disgust with the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. As Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has suggested, “you need to convince [the people] that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights.”
The country is still smarting from the trauma of 2020, and a public health crisis that touched every single part of our lives continues to have societal aftershocks. America is still facing down the biggest threat to its hard-won democracy, with a Republican presidential contender who led an insurrection against the country and remains above the law for it, thanks to the Supreme Court he stole. The reinvigorated drive for civil rights advancements—the one good thing that 2020 could be said to have wrought—now feels like it has only been met with backlash and further marginalization.
Everything in the air seems a little off. We’re all still sad and hurting in the years since 2020. If Biden could demonstrate that he actually gets why, and is willing to tackle the reasons, I think that more Americans would welcome that message than he thinks; they may finally feel their president understands them and is trying to do something for them. At the very least, it would be so much more than what they’ve heard from him until now.
