How to Heal

In a recent speech, Joe Biden claimed victory in the presidential election (before the ballots were all counted) and said "let the healing begin".

Let's examine that. For the last four years the left has broken all norms in the way they treated a legally-elected president. They called him a racist and a dictator, both claims without merit. They tried to keep him from taking office and, once he was inaugurated, they tried to remove him from office. He was impeached based on unsubstantiated rumors on the personal authority of the Speaker of the House.

Now that his successor has claimed victory we are supposed to forget all that and return to normal. The right is supposed to pretend that the last four years never happened and show the new President all the respect that the left denied President Trump.

Forget it. That's not going to just happen. If you want healing then there are some specific actions that Mr. Biden needs to take:

1. No criminal charges against Donald Trump of his family. There are prosecutors in New York who have been making it clear that they  desperately want to send the Trump family to jail. It doesn't matter if any laws were broken. As Bernie Sanders once said, "An inventive prosecutor can always find something to charge you with."

This is a terrible idea. It would make us look like a banana republic and the election look like a coup. More important, it breaks another norm and says that partisan hatred is sufficient cause to punish a former office-holder. That norm is vital. Like the one about showing respect for the President, once you break it you can't expect the other side to abide by the old rules. If the Trump family is charged then I guarantee that eventually Hunter Biden will go to jail, too.

Joe Biden needs to issue orders and twist arms to be certain that no one charges Donald Trump with anything.

2. No repercussions for supporting Trump. AOC, the Lincoln Project and others want lists made of all people who worked for the Trump administration or donated money to the Trump campaign so that they can be blacklisted. Keith Olbermann wants these people "removed from polite society". While it is true that Olbermann is a crank, he's a crank who used to be an MSNBC news anchor and he still has a large following.

Purging the government of anyone associated with the previous administration and ensuring they never work again is another broken norm and another page from the Banana Republic playbook. Biden must denounce this movement if there is to be any healing.

3. Biden needs to admit that he lied during the campaign. This would be the hardest thing for him. He likes to tell stories and he hates to admit that they are not true. He started his campaign on a lie, that Trump called Klansmen and neo-nazis good people. He repeated it constantly. But the transcripts clearly show that Trump denounced those groups and that the good people he was talking about were the ones who were protesting the removal of a statue. Trump then went on to accurately predict that Washington and Jefferson would be next.

71 million people voted for Donald Trump. They know what he actually said. Biden needs their respect if he wants the country to rally around him. The same is true for the claim that Trump called honored war dead "losers". No one who was with him will verify that story. John Bolton said that he'd have devoted a chapter in his book to it if it had happened. All of the sources for this claim are anonymous. We've been assured that these were people close to the President but the NYT said the same thing about their anonymous columnist and he turned out to have been a low-level consultant. Despite the dubiousness of this story, Biden repeated it again and again.

I know that right now Biden sees himself as the winner with no need to apologize for anything. He was running for "the soul of the nation" and he got more votes than any candidate in history. But Trump got more votes than anyone in history except Biden and Biden's winning margin was razor-thin in multiple states. The Republicans are on track to keep the Senate and have picked up multiple seats in the House. This was not a Blue Wave mandate and Biden should not act like it was.

I don't believe for a moment that Biden will do any of the things I've listed here. He has nothing but contempt for Donald Trump and Trump's supporters. He talks a lot about being willing to back down when he's wrong but he won't do that here. He's full of malarkey.