| | | SOMETIMES THERE’S A DAY THAT SUMS UP AN ERA. On Friday, it only took a morning.
At 9:30 a.m., Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing for his 34 felony convictions got underway in Justice Juan Merchan’s Manhattan courtroom. No prison or fines or confinement—the voters have spoken!—so it was largely symbolic.
In Washington an hour earlier, at 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics had released a stellar jobs report. Big whoop, right? What’s one more stellar jobs report after months and months of them? What’s another 256,000 new jobs? A number that not only “blew past forecasts,” as the New York Times put it, but was over double what economists had projected?
You can probably guess what happened next: Page 1 stories about Trump’s scandalous milestone, and President Joe Biden’s final jobs report buried on A12, or B1, or wherever. Whatever.
To be fair, Trump will be America’s first felon-in-chief, which is quite an achievement. Yet Biden has made history of his own: The economy added jobs every full month that he was in office, the first time that’s happened since the government began collecting data in 1939. “Zero months with job losses,” said his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.
Which man’s precedent had more impact on people’s lives? Biden’s, hands-down, and in a good way.
Which one was more compelling as reality TV? Trump’s—if you like your entertainment contentious and tawdry, with subplots about hush money, business fraud, and possibly determinative interference in an election over eight years ago..
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Whatever happened to judging people on character, competence, or both?
And why on earth choose someone who has neither? Are voters still, a decade into the MAGA era, judging candidates on how persuasively they make inane promises (I’ll end the Ukraine war in one day; I’ll singlehandedly reduce food prices) or float insane ideas (let’s buy Greenland; let’s annex Canada)? How does any of that compete with a larger, stronger NATO, more clean energy jobs and semiconductor manufacturing, and a real commitment to roads, bridges, ports, airports, the electric grid, and rural broadband?
Maybe people believed Trump’s strongman fantasies about driving costs down to what they were years ago—which he acknowledged recently are, indeed, fantasies. And Biden’s industrial policy advances obviously do not produce the same adrenaline rush as culture wars. Compromise and bipartisanship are dull compared with fiery battles within and between political parties.
There’s no question that governing is boring. But there’s also no question that we’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Goodbye, Good Governance. Hello, Insane Promises. |
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