First, everything he does is self-serving. (He doesn’t mind if he delays your check.) Second, his instincts are authoritarian. Third, his bravado, designed to conceal, only highlights his awareness of the deep political trouble he’s in because of his “corruption, carelessness, self-dealing, disinformation, ignorance and just plain meanness.” After all, “pandemics have a way of cutting through a lot of noise and spin to remind us of what is real and what is important.”

Former president Barack Obama used those words in his Tuesday video endorsing former vice president Joe Biden and didn’t even have to mention Trump’s name, a sign of how “total” the president’s failure is.

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This week will thus be remembered not for any of Trump’s antics but as the moment when Democrats rediscovered the Spirit of 2018, the year that gave them control of the House because every wing of the party realized that nothing good can happen in our politics until this plague of a presidency is first contained (the motivation behind the new House majority) and then defeated.

The urgent message from Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the voters of Wisconsin this week was: Enough!

One three-word tweet, poking fun at years (or decades?) of “Democrats in disarray” headlines, captured the reality. “Dems in array,” crowed Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

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Obama’s endorsement was important not just because of what he said about Biden and Trump, but also for what he revealed about Democrats. Obama went out of his way to declare that “if I were running today, I wouldn’t run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008. The world is different; there’s too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards.”

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He praised Sanders and echoed Warren’s call for “real structural change” because “the vast inequalities created by the new economy are easier to see now.”

Perhaps I should confess to bias because I recently published a book making this point, but Obama’s speech underscored that Democrats are far less divided than their primary battle suggested. From health care to climate change to economic inequality, Democrats have moved across the board in a more progressive direction. Obama has done so himself because he sees openings for social reform now that he didn’t have when he was in office.

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In her Wednesday video backing Biden, Warren alluded to the impact of the party’s internal debates by praising the former vice president’s openness to new ideas. “When you come with new facts or a good argument,” she said, “he’s not too afraid or too proud to be persuaded.” Sanders spoke in the same spirit about Biden in his Monday endorsement.

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Any doubts that the 2020 playing field is very different from 2016’s were laid to rest by the unexpected — and unexpectedly comfortable — victory of liberal Jill Karofsky over conservative incumbent Daniel Kelly in a race for a state Supreme Court seat that was a party contest in all but name.

In 2019, when conservative Brian Hagedorn eked out a 5,960-vote victory over liberal Lisa Neubauer in another Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Trump’s supporters touted it as a sign of how hard it would be for Democrats to carry the state over Trump, despite the Democratic surge in 2018.

So what will they say now about Karofsky’s inroads into conservative areas that allowed her to build a margin of more than 160,000 votes? Yes, Karofsky was helped by the presidential primary between Biden and Sanders that drew Democrats to the polls. But in going to court to force an election in the midst of a pandemic, Republicans figured they would win by holding down turnout in Democratic urban areas most affected by the virus. A shameful ploy was foiled because Democrats mobilized absentee ballots in unprecedented numbers. This speaks to where the energy in politics is right now. It’s not on Trump’s side.

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Thus, a wager: When Americans see Trump’s name on those stimulus checks, most won’t regard him as their benefactor. They will see a weak, desperate and selfish man who pretends that the money they pay in taxes is his own.