Why I voted for Biden — and against Trump

Back in the olden days of February 2020, after the first Democratic primary contests and before any Americans had died of the coronavirus, I wrote a post in response to someone on Facebook who asked who we’d vote for if the nominees were Trump and Bernie Sanders.

I explained why I’d vote for the Democrat even though he wasn’t my first choice in the primaries. What I wrote still applies now that the nominee is Joe Biden.

And that was before Trump’s inept, disingenuous, and reckless response to the pandemic, which has only strengthened my support for Biden.

So here’s an adaptation of what I said in February but with Biden’s name:

I don’t need to decide whether Biden will be a better president than Trump, in order to choose Biden over Trump. There’s something larger at stake, which is the need to send a message to the world and to history: “Whoops! We screwed up in 2016. We need a different tone and direction.”

If Trump is a two-term president, he’ll appear to have a halo 😇 in retrospect. People assume that Obama and Reagan were great presidents, whether or not they really were. One-term presidents who lose their reelection bids are generally seen as failures and footnotes to history, whether or not that’s deserved.

Making Trump a one-term president will have positive ripple effects that could last for decades, far beyond the next administration. It will change the thinking of future presidential candidates. It will change how the Trump administration is presented in history books.

In contrast, making Trump a two-term president will legitimize the idea that the president should sink to the lowest common denominator in his rhetoric, and try to close off America from other countries through his policies.

We need to make Trump a one-term president. We already know what we need to know about President Trump, and we have only one more chance to act on that knowledge. We don’t yet know what President Biden would be like, but if he turns out to be bad, we’ll be able to deal with that problem in other elections.

I don’t need to love Biden in order to vote for him. As others have said: voting isn’t a valentine, it’s a chess move.

(Photo of Biden by Gage Skidemore, via Wikipedia.)