The Democrats, with their finger on the pulse as usual, have put forward as one of the three viable candidates for president one Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing, who presided over the testimony of Thomas’s accuser Anita Hill. Saturday Night Live has already begun to poke fun at Biden for his handsiness with women. His early lead in the polls reflects the widespread belief — or, more accurately, the misguided resignation — that, just as the best defense against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, the surest way to beat an old white man is with another old white man.

Kamala Harris kneecapped Biden in the first debate. Confused Democrats reacted in either horror (“That was so mean!”) or jubilation (“Hell yeah! A Democrat is actually going on the offensive!”) at this unanticipated demonstration of badassery. The Democratic Party has been the GOP’s piñata for so long, its rank and file don’t know what it looks like when one of their own picks up the baseball bat and has at it.

Women are angry. How can they not be? One of the two political parties has all but declared war on them — and “centrist” candidates like Biden have pledged to put differences aside and work with his colleagues in the rape-apology party. For all her woo-woo, Marianne Williamson is right about one thing: love, not fear, is the way to unite the Democrats and defeat the President. Joe Biden is a panic nominee — and if this is an election about fear, Trump will prevail.

Trump wants us to be afraid. Fear creates panic, which impairs judgment. Trump also wants to exhaust our sense of outrage. The Hitlerian policy of separating refugee children from their parents, and detaining all in cages, is intended, first and foremost, to tire us all out to the point of lethargy, resignation, inactivity. There are limits to how much moral outrage a people can summon. On Twitter, one sees occasional calls for protests, for “people in the streets.” There may come a point when that happens, but for now, everyone is too tired, and too able to see the futility of such an endeavor: Fox News won’t show it, and the House Democrats keep firing off impotent letter after impotent letter as Trump’s minions snub subpoenas and he brings his feckless, hapless grifter daughter to world leader summits. Yes, I know, Pelosi and Nadler are playing the long game with the courts, as Mueller did before them, but the hourglass is running out of red-white-and-blue sand. As Roberto Bolaño writes in The Savage Detectives, a novel about renegade Mexican poets, “There’s a time for reciting poems, and there’s a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.”

As odious as Epstein’s sex crimes were, they are not, tactically speaking, a compelling argument to win over GOP hearts and minds. Trump’s, even more so. What the last two years have taught us is that most people do not care what’s happening in the country as long as they are unaffected personally. They don’t give a shit. The buoyant stock market (buoyant until this week, that is) and the low unemployment rate suggest that, for better or worse, business is continuing as usual. For all Trump’s efforts to infiltrate safe spaces — the NFL, reality TV, hip hop— it is still too easy to bury one’s head in the sand. The sad reality is that the plight of a Honduran asylum-seeker does not impact most of our lives one iota. Nor will people care that Epstein paid scores of underage girls to “massage” him and his creeper buddies (whatever actually went on in his manse and on his sex island, that is the watered-down narrative that will ultimately prevail).

GOP voters are cheap. They care mostly about low taxes. “Socialism” to them means “tax increase,” which is why that idiotic canard has teeth. The only way to get selfish people to hop to is to demonstrate that Trump and his cronies are ripping off — stealing from — the American people. From them. It’s all about the money. A focus on money may have had a better result in the Kavanaugh confirmation. A focus on money will have a better result in the Epstein investigation, too.

Yes, Epstein sex-trafficked underage girls. Yes, he allegedly involved all manner of rich and powerful people in his debauchery: Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew, Bill Richardson and George Mitchell, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Yes, the details of his untimely demise don’t pass the smell test, making his death the ultimate “Choose Your Own Adventure” tale. It all reads like a very good novel.

More important: He lived in a Manhattan mansion worth $77 million, and we don’t know how exactly he made his millions. Was he a money launderer, like Trump? A blackmail specialist extraordinaire? Was he part of a Russian mob operation to gather kompromat on influential figures? Is that why his longtime partner was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of fraudster Robert Maxwell, business partner of the Russian mob head Semion Mogilevich?