I have attended the annual CPAC hootenanny just often enough to know I never want to go back to one again. However, the only real contagions I ever noticed there were greed and ignorance, to which some people have no natural immunity. This year, though, it seems that the wingding functioned as a kind of petri dish, especially among its celebrity entertainers. Somebody carrying the coronavirus got through with a VIP pass and may have passed the virus along to a number of VIPs—including, perhaps, the President* of the United States. Of course, if Vanity Fair’s reporting is accurate, the president* has his own theories as to how he may have come in contact with the current pandemic.

Stories about Trump’s coronavirus fears have spread through the White House. Last week Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. The source also said Trump has asked the Secret Service to set up a screening program and bar anyone who has a cough from the White House grounds. “He’s definitely melting down over this,” the source said.



Good to know, as the aisles at Trader Joe’s turn into Fury Road.



The biggest miscalculation I made in covering the Democratic primary campaign this year was underestimating the pure political power of how many people just want a president and a government that they don’t have to think about every day. I understood that the impulse was out there. That’s been obvious at least since the 2018 midterms. People just want things to make sense again. I understand that.

What I missed was how powerful that impulse would be politically when it finally found a candidate able to give it purpose and focus. Over the last three weeks, in his rambling, halting, stumbling way, Joe Biden has become that candidate, and the coalescence of all that deep desire for normalcy behind what is an otherwise unremarkable candidacy has been a stunning thing to watch. And the administration’s profound bungling of the ongoing pandemic has given focus to everything those same people don’t want their government to be. To a lot of folks, Joe Biden is that old-time religion. He’s good enough for me.



Biden’s hands look safe compared to the man he wants to replace. MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

On Tuesday, which is not a Super Tuesday but is a pretty important one, Biden looks set to carry primaries in Mississippi, Missouri, and quite possibly Michigan. If that happens, then the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is essentially over. Bernie Sanders will have enough money to contest every primary and caucus until the end of the process, but he will have no chance at the nomination and all he will be able to do is make trouble for Biden. And this is not 2016. The country now knows what it’s like to have this president* in charge of things, and it is not going to look kindly this time around on any disruption coming from another direction.



You don’t have to be clairvoyant to see trouble down the road. The damage that this administration has done to the country is massive and is going to require massive and creative solutions. We are not going to wake up on the first Wednesday of November and find that it is 2012 all over again. Quietude is not the natural state of things in a healthy democracy anyway, but the desire for it this time around is so overwhelming that politicians may be gun-shy about proposing solutions equal to the magnitude of the problems. The revolution, it seems, will not be televised, because the revolution, it seems, will be postponed, or played in an empty arena.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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