It’s difficult to forget the last year. 

It’s hard to reach back to a time, as President Biden alluded to on Thursday, before old photos and videos weren’t abjectly depressing to revisit. That is, before double-masking, George Floyd as a household name, and “Capitol Hill riots” were ever things. 

On the surface level, America’s politics were as rancorous as ever, with the sitting president having just survived impeachment, following years of shaky suspicions of having colluded with a foreign power. His pitchfork, braggadocious and uncouthly Boomer style made him a deeply divisive force in American life, especially, convulsively for young people. 

His chaotic, even pseudo-Darwinian, often incoherent management of his White House and political operations was great fun for the media, but manna from heaven to his Democratic antagonists and Republican rivals. Donald Trump was decidedly, though not overwhelmingly unpopular despite sitting on — that is, seriously contributing to — the hottest, most equitable U.S. economy in decades, unlike his predecessors entering no new foreign wars, and shaking the country’s trade and immigration paradigms, doing so while avoiding collapsing the stock market. Indeed, he engorged it.

But from the establishment’s winter came springtime for reversal.

First, the most formidable candidate Trump could face on the Democratic side was suddenly and quite unexpectedly anointed after months of his squandering previous front-runner status. Republican operative overconfidence that the GOP could caricature former Vice President Joe Biden as near-senile and corrupt belied similair, if not superior public concerns over Trump’s health (especially after later contracting COVID-19) and his own, likely familial graft. That the rise of Biden would be immediately imperiled with interchangeable enmity of the sort Hillary Clinton once inspired was also proved fallacy. 

With Biden’s pledge for normalcy, Trump could have well have been a victim of his own success, with the nation seeing little further use for an erratic populist. 

Enough shaking up had been done, and Biden was inoffensive enough for most people besides political junkies, of both the leftist and partisan Republican stripes. We’ll never know, but here’s postulating Trump would never have gotten as close as he did last fall if it hadn’t been for the previous, riotous summer. 

But the riotous summer, spurred on by a new age of pandemic — and lockdown — is what happened.

The protest-cum-violence movement that swept the country last year provided the shock troops that brought the Biden-Harris tacket across the finish line, but perversely may have narrowed the Democrats’ eventual margins, with shock losses in House districts thought near-unwinnable for the GOP, in such as rightist climes as California.

The summer of Floyd also consigned Biden, a career centrist, to be a president of the left. 

Andrew Sullivan, a moderate, made the case on Friday: “Biden is doing what Obama never could (or wanted to). Uncle Joe’s reputation for moderation, his old white-guy familiarity, his past centrism, his age and working-class affect, his confused senior stare and stuttering speech, has become a brilliant frontman for intensifying left-radicalism.” 

Continues Sullivan: 

“On ‘social justice; questions, Biden mandates ‘equity’ as a core principle in all policy-making, and Ibram Kendi indoctrination sessions for government employees; he is likely to end due process for college men accused of sexual assault or rape; he wants to legislate that sex-based rights are trumped by gender-based rights, and to repeal the Religious Freedom Restoration Act when it comes to gays, lesbians and transgender people. After a lifetime of opposition, Biden now backs full public funding of abortion. On immigration, Biden’s goal appears to be facilitating as much of it as possible, while granting a mass amnesty. Am I missing something?”

I don’t believe Andrew is.

For now, with surging vaccination rates — with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Sunday show invitations on the wane — the country is girding for a deserved, jubilant summer. “A couple of good years right before the pandemic aside, it has been two decades of overwhelming inequality and underwhelming growth,” writes Neil Irwin in the New York Times.

What Irwin, of course, elides, is that those were Trump’s years. As the writer Charles McElwee has remarked to me, “it felt like 1999,” if more levered up.  

Trump’s border crackdown didn’t crash the economy, as was predicted. The most horror-show element of Trump’s immigration policy has been revealed, in just recent days, to be essentially bipartisan. The comeback of trade nationalism likewise didn’t tank the markets, as was constantly foreshadowed. It appears Biden’s team likes swaths of Trump’s approach just fine, especially as it pertains to the regime in Beijing.  

No doubt, until this time last year, luck was on tap for Trump. Take Iran, where an assassination of Iran’s storied general Qassem Soleimani seemed surely a harbinger of wider American war, if not gnarly Iranian retaliation in Europe or the homeland before the election. It wasn’t, and it didn’t happen, as I myself argued it well might on Tucker Carlson Tonight the night the strike was unveiled. 

Noting the lunacy of its excesses, that Trump’s style of Iran hawkishness seemingly set the table for a previously unimaginable detente of sorts between Israel and the Sunni Arab world should give pause to realists who argued such a path was automatically doomed. That the Israeli leadership is mounting a fulsome defense of its civilization at a time where American leadership is evidently abdicative in such a defense is more reason for reflection.

Which all compounds the sincere tragedy of how the forty-fifth president chose to go out following the clarity of his election defeat. 

But putting aside the flash and the fury of the last four months, a positive policy legacy is there to be gleaned from the last four years. Trump himself might eventually decide to pick up that mantle himself. Which is curious, considering, in the end, Trump’s own disinterest in governing was his undoing. 

If Trump thought that lockdowns weren’t the way to go, he could have opened the country back up, as he professed interest in doing as early as Easter. He could have even sacked Fauci, a risky gambit, sure, but one that would have shown who was in charge in the crisis: the president, or the bureaucracy he was sent to D.C. to overthrow. Relative lockdown skepticism has aged well. As Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in National Review: “A year ago, I was worried that some… were unusually skeptical of the threat posed by disease, and unusually suspicious of public-health regulations and advice. I was wrong to be worried. They were largely right.” 

Sure, California or New York, under the leadership of then-media darlings Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo, might have resisted. But, Trump could have at least dared blue states to follow his lead, taken a middle road (encouraging mask use and social distancing, but not abject panic and government power grab) and offered a clean alternative to Democrats beholden to lockdown mantra. Old haters and jolted lovers, alike, might have been more tempted by another spin at the wheel— something that wouldn’t have actually happened against Biden sans crisis.

If Trump had lost a more conventional race against Biden, in a world without Coronavirus, he could have at least held his head a little higher, an improvement over his present, precarious political status. But then, we have learned, he wouldn’t have been Donald Trump. Instead, as was shown earlier in other realms of his foreign policy, such as Syria and Afghanistan, Trump complained about American policy, but as president of the United States, did nary enough to change it. 

If he had, he might not be in exile.