Biden's Withering Olive Branch [View all]

[Zorro]

The new year will prove whether we have any decency left in us.

By Frank Bruni

The year will turn, Joe Biden will take the oath of office, and we’ll heal.

That was the fundamental promise of his campaign, no? That was the hope.

But I’m struggling mightily to hold on to even a sliver of it.

Like President-elect Biden, I believe in common ground, in comity, in identifying where we intersect rather than where we diverge. I was drawn to him, as were a critical mass of other Americans, because he represented the calm after the storm, the sense after the sensation.

But is calm a mirage? Is normalcy obsolete? In the many weeks since it became clear that he lost the election, Donald Trump has successfully marketed an outrageous alternate reality, so that 70 percent of registered Republican voters, according to a Quinnipiac poll this month, believe that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Trump has taken his refusal to concede to historic, previously unthinkable lengths. And an overwhelming majority of Republican members of Congress have played along, actively or passively, many of them knowing better, all of them traitors to democracy and profiles in cowardice.

To this crew Biden is supposed to extend an olive branch?

From this bunch he’s expected to wring droplets of decency?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opinion/biden-mcconnell-republicans.html