From the start of his 2020 campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr. insisted that President Trump was an aberration, his norm-breaking, race-baiting tenure anathema to the national character. “It’s not who we are,” Mr. Biden often said, “not what America is.”And at the end of the 2020 campaign, an anxious, quarrelsome country is turning a question back at him: Are you sure? For millions of Trump supporters, the last four years have been a time when things changed for the better, when they felt they had a president who knew exactly who they were. They cheered pre-virus jobs success, shifts in the tax code, trade fights with China and the emerging rightward tilt of the Supreme Court. But they often responded more viscerally to the fury than the finer points: Mr. Trump’s eager brawls against elites and institutions, against threats to conservatives’ preferred social order, against shared enemies.

Source: International New York Times November 03, 2020 23:00 UTC