WASHINGTON– Sidebar, Caesar.

No real word yet on who reached out first — the Wilmington White House, Joe Biden’s basement government-in-waiting, or the actual White House — but on Monday the extraordinary came to pass. President Donald Trump spoke to someone he disagrees with not named Anthony Fauci.

Fox News reports that after much gamesmanship — camp Biden reaching out to the president, hearing nada, capped off with a Trump taunt earlier in the morning — the duo conferred by phone Monday afternoon. The presumptive Democratic nominee, of course, had to take time from podcasts, protein shakes and potential vice presidents. 

The conversation occurred on a mixed day of news in the Coronavirus saga. 

The Dow surged sixteen-hundred points and change on hopes that America is nearing the dark before dawn. A new round of stimulus is also rumored, even as anxious Americans await their checks from the first package. But Trump’s tribune in London, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was sent to the intensive care unit Monday, in the latest development in what is now the most famous incidence of COVID-19. 

The pair, Biden and Trump, chatted this Holy Week in an ever-rarer display of public spiritedness. Biden vies to replace Trump as head of the government, as the forty-fifth president expands the scope and scale of that government at a rate not seen in generations. 

It’s easy to brush off the exchange as a piffle.

And that will likely look right in the hours from this writing when Trump again whacks at somnolent Joe and the doyen of Delaware once more urges a cessation, please, of the malarkey. But Biden and Trump agreeing to a presidential parlee, if only for a moment, is rarer than you might think. 

Trump and Barack Obama had never met before the forty-fourth president invited the next guy to the White House in the days following his shock triumph in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s delayed concession — the morning after Election Day, not the evening of — represented another valley in this country’s collapsed discourse, including between elites. 

Biden is charged by compatriots to his left with seeking a career capstone, but with an outdated, pollyannaish attitude toward Republicans. Biden’s continued insistence on dialogue is an extension of the failed objective of the man he served, Mr. Obama, who sought to unite America only to leave it more bitterly divided. 

The lieutenant of Trump’s predecessor will now, of course, try to dislodge his more savage successor. With a nation reeling, today’s trade of information could be a preview, come autumn, of a less caustic environment than last time, in what is already likely to be an effectively shortened campaign. That all remains to be seen. 

At the very least, we got a nice breather before a return to the political badlands.