After Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was indicted, humorist Garrison Keillor wrote a tongue-in-cheek column titled “Donald Trump is done.” Keillor satirized the sense of triumphalism that arises among liberals every time our corrupt, sleazy president gets embroiled in a fresh scandal—a silly self-assuredness that this could be the one that finally does him in:

He is NOT A NICE PERSON and so the name Trump is as popular as herpes these days. Trumpet players have taken up the cornet. Card players refer to the lead suit as the jump suit. Tramps prefer to be called hoboes, town dumps are now refuse heaps, and girls named Dawn are becoming Cheryls.

This was back in 2017, but the piece is evergreen because the mentality that Keillor skewered persists.

Washington Monthly declared that “Trump is finished” in 2018, when it was revealed that Michael Cohen had actually gone to Prague like the Steele Dossier alleged. He was “finished” again in 2019 in the wake of Lev Parnas’ “bombshell” revelations.

Following Joe Biden’s Super Tuesday victory, Salon ran a column titled “Get on board for President Joe: He’ll win, and Trump is finished.” It’s loaded with every fallacy that drives the absurd overconfidence liberals have about their prospects for beating Trump.

The author Lucian Truscott points out that Biden won in states where his campaign “had either a weak ground game, or no ground game at all.” He notes that “Biden’s fundraising has been soft, and his TV ad campaign has been almost nonexistent.”

Biden won despite his weaknesses, and Truscott concludes that there can be only one explanation: Everyone is so sick of Trump, they’re flocking to Biden in droves:

Biden’s campaign may have been underfunded and limping going into Super Tuesday, but he benefited from something money can’t buy: hatred of an incompetent, ignorant, dictatorial incumbent president. Biden can stumble over sentence phrasing and mistake his wife for his sister until the cows come home, and he looks like a superman compared to Trump.

Truscott credits anti-Trump sentiment with Biden’s sudden surge, while ignoring the more obvious effect of the field inexplicably consolidating behind him and the millions of dollars in free media that resulted from that wave of endorsements.

Democrats literally believe that Trump is so weak and unpopular right now that all they need is a warm body with a D by his name.

This week The Atlantic ran a piece called “Stay Alive, Joe Biden,” the subtitle of which was “Democrats need little from the front-runner beyond his corporeal presence.” The author argued that the “idea” of Biden “as both Trump’s inverse and co-equal” is more important than his platform or his campaign infrastructure or even his ability to do the basic tasks of online stumping that the coronavirus outbreak requires.

Slate published a column along similar lines, making the case that Democrats “got what they bargained for with Joe Biden,” which is “maybe just enough to get by.” The author sets the bar so low that Biden can sleepwalk over it, writing that he gives voters what they want: “A distant presence who will not be actively alienating and who is associated with enough good ideas and capable people that you could reasonably bet on him to be an improvement over the current disaster.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but that’s the case for Joe Biden in a nutshell: Trump is bad and Biden is good enough.

But what if he isn’t?