The ‘Son of a Bitch’ Is Back. So What Comes Next?
Biden promised and delivered a return to norms. Now it’s time to raise hell. For as long as it takes.
AS WE LEARNED ON ELECTION DAY, it has been all too easy for too many to forget what America was going through when President Joe Biden ran—and won—by promising to restore both the soul of the nation and grounded, reassuring leadership.
He delivered. Yet we’ve ended up back where we started.
The lesson going forward is that we need a far more aggressive approach. Much as I or anyone might yearn again for stability and calm, the time for that is over. We’re in a give-’em-hell period that should start now and continue right through 2032.
It’s not hard to understand Biden’s 2020 victory. Just recall a few of the graphic toplines: Donald Trump had dragged the country through a manic, ethics-free presidency. It started with Muslim bans, racist slurs, and a massive tax cut that enriched the rich. It ended in a global pandemic that brought fear, hardship, and tragedy, and proved far beyond Trump’s severely limited capacity to lead.
Biden campaigned amid the daily display of Trump’s pettiness in the teeth of crisis, his bizarre public speculation about sunlight and bleach as COVID treatments, the grim daily death counts, and the refrigerated trucks stacked with bodies that overcrowded hospital morgues could not handle. Then Trump incited a deadly riot, tried to steal an election, and absconded with top-secret government documents to wave around golf clubs and store in his bathroom.
Biden was not elected because he was a firebrand. He was not elected because he would upend the world order or wage a new war on poverty or exert iron control over the Justice Department. If he had managed merely to tread water, that would have been a relief to many of his voters.
Yet he did far more than tread water. It’s no secret that I view the Biden presidency as consequential. At Bluesky, my new social media home, I’ve been struck by some of the negativity toward him—dismissive views of his economic achievements, predictions that Trump will eviscerate them, but mostly frustration that he did not succeed in protecting America and banishing Trump from public life. Anger that the Democrats did not “take care of the son of a bitch for us,” as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said a few days after Trump loyalists attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Democratic-led House did impeach Trump, but Democrats could not finish the job alone in a 50–50 Senate. They needed seventeen Republican votes to reach the two-thirds supermajority required to convict Trump in his impeachment trial and bar him from office forever. McConnell, the GOP leader, initially predicted a strong bipartisan vote against Trump. In the end, McConnell himself wimped out. He did not wrangle any votes to convict, nor did he vote that way himself. Only seven Republicans joined the Democrats, and that was ten short.
Cued by McConnell, Republicans right then and there quashed the quickest, cleanest way to “take care of the son of a bitch.” Yet now some blame Biden for Trump’s rise from the muck of his lies, indictments, and criminal convictions.
They have a point, up to a point. The return of Trump is a shared failure—a bipartisan failure of imagination and of action that has persisted for nearly a decade. Biden beat Trump because Biden represented a return to norms and normalcy. And Merrick Garland, who had a thoughtful temperament well suited for a Supreme Court nominee but was blocked from the Court by McConnell, ended up as Biden’s attorney general. In that role, he was mild-mannered and methodical—perhaps overly so. And thus he thwarted McConnell’s explicit hope that the criminal and civil justice systems would hold the former president accountable in a way that McConnell himself failed to do.
NOW WE KNOW MORE and we know better. This scenario cannot repeat itself. Whatever Trump has wrought by 2028, whatever shape America is in, however much we may long for serenity and boredom, that’s not a feasible path. Trump is constitutionally barred from running for the presidency again, but he could be facing prison or more trials, so we can’t assume that he won’t try. If he does step aside, he could be succeeded by a MAGA protégé as careless, underqualified, and disruptive as he is. There are plenty of them in the wings, including his vice president.
In 2028, Democrats and their allies need a fiery, forceful presidential nominee who pledges to fight like hell to fix all that will have gone fundamentally wrong by then. A big-picture, visionary thinker grounded in American values. Someone with excellent communication skills who doesn’t shy from debate or confrontation. A hardball player against stasis and for democracy.
A comfortable Uncle Joe–type president was what America chose and probably needed in 2020. After another round of Trump, I’m betting many of us will be ready for a disrupter of our own—a persuasive, impassioned disrupter for the common good. All we need to do is make it through the disaster that’s already upon us.
 | A guest post by
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