Who Is This For?

There are some interesting suggestions floating around out there for actions President Biden could take on his way out the door. Commute all federal death sentences, go all-out on canceling more student loan debt, and so on — at this point there are essentially zero possible electoral consequences, so why not check off a few legacy-defining, right-side-of-history sorts of items?

There are also calls to do all that is possible to protect the country from what’s coming; after all, Biden, Harris, and everyone else has spent months describing the president-elect as a unique threat to democracy and the future of the country. When his former top officials and military generals call him a fascist, it seems like offering up at least some temporary roadblocks to the f-word’s implementation might be a priority.

So what’s a good first step? Apparently, having a nice chat at the White House.

“Donald, congratulations,” the president said on Wednesday, sitting in front of a comfy-looking fire at the White House. Next to him was the fascist, the threat, the unique malevolence himself. They shook hands and smiled. How nice! Biden said he was “looking forward to having a, like we said, smooth transition.” He and his team  would “do everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated, what you need.”

When one thinks of the prominent fascist leaders of history, one might blanche at the idea of “accommodating” them. But the long-standing insistence on civility from Democrats — an insistence that both parties crow about, but only one is expected to follow — will not go quietly. This meeting, a rerun of a similar scene from eight years ago but very notably not from four years ago, is a decade’s worth of “but my norms!” taken physical form.

It doesn’t matter, of course, not in a meaningful sense of what comes after it; refusing to follow a banal tradition like this wouldn’t substantively change what grim and squalid things that, say, Pete Hegseth does as Defense Secretary, or Mike Huckabee does as ambassador to Israel. But it sends a very particular message: that the warnings from the top were just political rhetoric, just another campaign strategy like any other, and not an actual call to action or signal of impending catastrophe. As the independent journalist Marisa Kabas said on Bluesky, it is nothing more than “modeling acquiescence.” It allows the shocking racism and misogyny and transphobia and every other conceivable form of bigotry on display throughout the campaign and the entire MAGA history to fade into the background, symbolically burned in the pleasantly crackling fire behind the two presidents as if it will now magically disappear up the White House chimney and out of our lives.

It won’t, obviously. We can’t yet know just how bad this gets, where the needle on the “incompetence/malevolence” dial currently sits and where it will swing over four years, and what that will mean for any of us. But if any of the warnings were intended seriously, why do it? Who is the intended audience for this theater? What mythical 2026 or 2028 voter is out there, watching a two-minute clip in November 2024 thinking, “I’m glad they can still be nice to each other”?

As the two sat there, the possibility that things might be as bad as the Democratic leadership themselves have told us seemed untenable; who would let Franco or Mussolini into their living room, knowing what we know? Trump seemed happy to put on his Normal Guy skinsuit for a few minutes, given the totality of his victory. “[P]olitics is tough,” he said. “And it’s, many cases, not a very nice world, but it is a nice world today. And I appreciate it very much — a transition that’s so smooth it’ll be as smooth as it can get.”

Biden just nodded and smiled along. “Welcome back,” he said.