It seems fair to say there never has been an election like 2020 and, God willing, there never will be another one like it.
In the United States, talk of the election begins almost indecently early. We know it’s coming, we know when, and we can hardly wait to get the ball rolling.
This time, it was all about the Democrats jostling each other for the right to challenge Donald Trump. What a fun parade of contenders we saw in the debates — 23 at one time or another. Some of the names will be a surprise when we remember them in the future. Seth Moulton, anyone? Deval Patrick might prefer we forget about his quixotic late entry. The subtext was always which one of them could win a national election.
After Super Tuesday on March 3, it was down to two: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Yes, we were waiting to see which septuagenarian white man would go up against the septuagenarian white man in the White House. Not much of a parable for the moment.
Then the world changed for everyone, and it hasn’t changed back. It was a chilly and socially distanced spring here in the Northeast. As the weather warmed and the pandemic crisis abated, the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police became the galvanizing news event of the season.
Floyd, a Black man, had been detained on suspicion of passing a counterfeit bill. Video of a police officer grinding his knee into the suffocating Floyd’s neck for almost 9 minutes catalyzed outrage across the country and around the world. In Portland, Ore., it sparked daily demonstrations that continue to this day. Protests and vigils were held throughout the Pioneer Valley over the following month. A thousand people rallied on the Amherst town common for racial justice; the next day, well over a thousand marched through Northampton and demonstrated outside the police station.
“Defund the police” became a rallying cry for some and presented Trump with a campaign issue he did not fail to exploit. His efforts to demonize the overwhelmingly peaceful protesters and pin occasional acts of destruction on Democratic politicians might have helped him more if he hadn’t proven so feckless in his own attempts to appear strong, as when he ordered the National Guard to clear a contingent of Washington protesters with tear gas so he could go stand outside a church and hold up a Bible.
With all the economic and cultural ferment of 2020, the dominant election issue was the coronavirus. Donald Trump didn’t want to talk about it, but no one could avoid it.
In September, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” was teased with the headline that Trump knew perfectly well in March that America faced a deadly pandemic, and he chose to play it down. Then in October, the virus got him.
For a few days, we were treated to the Trump White House in full confounding disinformation mode as it tried to spin the president’s illness in various ways. Remember the limo ride? In no time — almost as if he didn’t want to worry us — and with the aid of a no doubt staggeringly expensive drug regimen, the denier-in-chief was back to telling us we didn’t have to worry. Oy vey.
What effect would all this have on the election? Surprisingly little, it seems. It was a game of inches, with Biden inexorably eking out victory as the tide of mail-in ballots was counted around the country. He got just shy of 81.3 million votes, a record along with the 159.7 million people who voted.
But Trump still received almost 75 million votes — more than any other presidential candidate in history except his opponent. It’s not enough for him, obviously. If he lost, the game was rigged. It’s been fascinating to watch a man so pathologically obsessed with winning react by going all in on a losing bet. With one successful legal challenge out of at least 50 dismissed, denied or withdrawn since Nov. 3, Trump has become the king of losers, a byword for futility.
He’ll have some other life, of course. There’s talk of a television network, of a 2024 presidential run. From this vantage point, it looks as though he’ll be holed up in some gilded monstrosity raving about electoral fraud for months to come. Time will tell. For the rest of us, it’s time to close the book on a disastrous year and a disastrous presidency.
We know it’s a divided country. Oddly enough, both sides seem to believe the other wants to destroy our freedoms. But at least we won’t have an overprivileged, underqualified narcissist with dictatorial leanings masquerading as the leader of the free world. That was another time, in the dark days of 2020.