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Nov 02, 2020 By Steve King Photography by Adam Schultz for the Biden Campaign

Joe Biden was not my first choice to be the Democratic nominee in 2020. He picked my first choice as his Vice Presidential nominee. But he may be the man for this moment.

Joe Biden’s life has been crafted by pain. His crucible has been his family, with different members dying at different stages of his life. His wife and daughter in the 1970s and his firstborn son, Beau, in 2015, the latter being the reason he didn’t run for president in 2016. He has a close relationship with grief. It’s been written all over his face for decades. America is a grieving country right now.

Joe Biden has not lived a charmed life. His family was shattered in the ’70s, and it’s clear that pain is never far from the front of his mind. The current president wouldn’t know grief if he fucked it while his third wife was pregnant and he had to pay it half a million dollars to not share the story with the tabloids.

With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the lightning-fast confirmation of Handmaiden Amy Coney Barret (in order the steal the 2020 election and kill Roe v. Wade), even if Biden wins, the courts have been so corrupted by Mitch McConnell and Trump, any victory Democrats enjoy will be short-lived, as they watch any progressive legislation they pass be challenged and defeated in court.

Yaass Queen Notorious RBG™ may have been a feminist icon hero, but I don’t know, part of being a hero and leaving a legacy is knowing when to make your exit. When you gotta go, you gotta go. RBG should have retired in 2013, right after the last real president had just won reelection and Democrats still had tenuous control of the Senate. I know. I know. I’m not supposed to say that for a myriad of reasons, but that doesn’t make what I’m saying any less true. Politics is war, and you have to be strategic because one egotistical decision can destroy everything you spent your life fighting for. She knew after McConnell stole the Merrick Garland seat and forced through Brett “Dickwagger” Kavanaugh that ACB was on deck. She knew the whole time how close to the sun she was flying. The war is lost. Lost for a long time. They are coming for Roe, marriage equality, and god knows what else. That’s part of the RBG legacy too. Health care reform, any Wall Street regulations, the Green New Deal, whatever. They’re all fucked until the court can be leveled out. And that will not be anytime soon, so thanks, 2016 third party voters. This flaming shitsack is entirely on your doorstep.

Democratic voters are still the majority and we’ve got a few more million reasons to keep fighting; mainly, that we’ve won the last 20 years of presidential contests. Only a couple were stolen. But confirming ACB is more important to Republicans than keeping control of a Senate majority. It’s more important than the Trump presidency. It’s everything. Presidents come and go; majorities endure until they can’t anymore. The Supreme Court is the whole ball game.

President Trump, for his part, couldn’t tell his rally-goers that RBG had died, for fear that the audience would cheer. He then announced ACB at the Rose Garden Massacre, er, White House Superspreader Event, and then promptly infected himself, his family, the upper echelons of Republican power, and most of his administration and campaign staff. Most of the Joint Chiefs had to self-quarantine. For a short period of time everyone was wondering about the chain of succession. The schadenfreude was glorious, but ACB was still confirmed to the court.

This election is simple. It’s a nice old man or unrelenting darkness and evil. Which do you prefer? The depths of Trump’s evil cannot be measured on any human scale. If forced hysterectomies and kids in cages weren’t enough, he was impeached for trying to use another country to smear Biden, and when that failed and he knew he had most likely been infected with Covid, he intentionally arrived late at their first debate in order to try to infect Biden. He literally tried to kamikaze Biden. (And that’s just what he tried to do to Biden. Forget about the ladies.) The reason Trump was such a toxic frothing dick in the first debate was that he was trying to get Biden to stutter and thus sound like a cognitively impaired mushmouth.

Biden still subscribes to the old “When they go low, we go high” Michelle Obama bullshit. He’s a Disney character in a Blumhouse movie. But he is such a decent man, it’s hard to think of a better person Democrats could have nominated to face Trump, and give the country an honest to god personal comparison of presidential character.

I know the ’60s were awesome and all but we’ve got fireworks going off every night, riots, and cities burning. A pandemic. Social justice surgery to perform. And chaos nipping at our tits. The wheels are coming off. The whole operation is starting to tip over; like, from the beginning it was built to spill. I am so sick of living through history. It would be nice to have some boring politics as usual, and Biden is nothing if not that. He even sprinkles a little dumbass in there just to give us something to laugh at from time to time.

Compassion or death and destruction? You pick.

Trump has fucked up so bad that he might be losing seniors. Do you understand how bad things need to be for American olds to not put racism as the first reason for voting Republican? That’s bad.

He has whined, raged, thrashed, bitched, and failed. The experiment is over. It didn’t work out. Everyone expected a close race, but it’s looking like a blowout. I still think it’ll be closer than everybody thinks, and would say it’s a six or seven point race. Maybe five.

But… for a moment… entertain the fantasy of a landslide. A Joe Biden landslide? What? I mean… If Joseph Robinette Biden wins a larger vote share than Obama I’m gonna be a little mad, right? The one thing I didn’t expect was to entertain the notion of a complete and total victory of winning the Senate and crushing Trump.

Fours years ago I said that Trump needed to be decimated to make sure this kind of thing never happens again. We are now flirting with that very possibility. This is really weird. I’m apprehensive of my own optimism. That’s what 2020 has done to us. There has been massive turnout in early voting. The numbers of young people voting early are off the charts. Seniors may be rebelling against Trump. People are playing music and dancing in hours-long voting lines. By sabotaging the US Postal Service, the president effectively scared people into actually making plans to vote early. Instead of a choice, Trump has guaranteed that the election is a referendum on himself, and has essentially turned the whole country against him.

With voter suppression and the inevitability of Trump contesting the election, we’re all still expecting a bad ending. He could fight it in court, and now he has his Troll Attorney General and Supreme Court majority and could maybe deliver a win but Biden has enough “fuck you money” to fight him. We all know it’ll be overly dramatic but what if it’s not? What if the universe was setting up this terrible year to end on a lighter note? If Trump loses, he’ll no longer be protected by the powers of the presidency and he can be indicted, within the statute of limitation, just like any human. We have the ability to ruin his life! Let’s gooooooo!

Yeah, in the other reality, sure, we’ve got plans. We’re gonna kill the filibuster and we’ll run the whole table. Pack the court? Yeah. Fuck that Handmaid Lady! Throw the president in jail? Of course. Green New Deal? Public option? Ha! Helllooooo Reparations!!! DC and Puerto Rico statehood, election day as a national holiday, raise the minimum wage, tax the rich, find out if Mitch McConnell is still medically alive, ban assault rifles, abolish the electoral college? Here we fucking come!

I’m sorry, I’ve been radicalized. Obama pushed some Republicans over the edge, and it goes the same for liberals. We’ll win a majority, get rid of the filibuster, and run wild. That’s the hope anyway… Hope is a dangerous thing to have in 2020. But it’s the last thing people of conscience always have left. It’s no fun living on a razors edge.

As much as I want all that exciting progressive shit, I’d rather be bored. We’ve had the Bush years, the Obama years, the Trump years…. I want to be deliriously, violently bored. I want to gag on politics as usual. I want to choke on boredom. I want that boredom to touch that little dangly thing that swings in the back of my throat.

I’m afraid to say things are looking good. I’m scared to think if this election is the #hashtag Blue Wave (lol) polls indicate that we might know on election night who the winner is, and that all the fears of a contested election and threats of violence are unfounded because you can’t claim an election was stolen when you’ve just had your ass kicked all over the map. Hopefully, there will be no “Red Mirage.” There I go using the H word again. What am I saying? Trump has sued more people than anyone else in human existence. Of course, there will be court battles. They’re already trying to rig the vote.

In the waning days of the worst election in a lifetime Trump kept doing his Jonestown rally-superspreader events. They were responsible for at least 30,000 infections and 700 deaths. The president, in the final days of the election, called domestic terrorists patriots and said that doctors get paid more for caring for COVID patients. He even wants to keep campaigning after election day and hold an election night party in the East Room with 400 people. Gotta top Jim Jones’ body count, right? When his supporters blocked off highways and tried to run a Biden bus off the road, he said they were protecting the people inside. It’s a hell of a thing to watch one of the two major American political parties turn into a cult, but, here we are, on the eve of an election, with everyone expecting it to end in violence.

It would be nice to have an election where foreign interference didn’t play a role. One where we never cared about Hunter Biden or feared the Russians hadn’t already hacked into our voting systems.

The White House is currently on lockdown. We are in that strange place, inside of a vacuum, waiting to breathe either a sigh of relief or one of resignation. Balzac said “Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.” But Klingon monk Tenavik said, “The present is a veil between anticipation and horror.” The next week will be a definitive moment in the American character. We’re about to find out who we really are…

Happy Election Day!

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