The 2020 presidential election was between a man who’d come to Washington only a brief time earlier and accomplished a great deal and another man who’d spent his entire life in Washington and done next to nothing. Unfortunately for the country, the latter man won. And political analyst Bruce Thornton says that isn’t turning out as voters might have hoped.

Joe Biden was touted by his supporters as the anti-Trump, the seasoned politician and “centrist” who had the experience, gravitas, and governing skills that the radical “demagogue” Donald Trump lacked. Supposedly, Biden also possessed the respect for “democratic norms” and the “empathy” lacking in the abrasive tweetster and crude-talking ex-reality show host. Elect Biden, the pitch went, and the “adults” will be back in charge, the sacred “norms” and “decorum” once again respected, and our status in the world restored.

This appeal, of course, depended on hyping Trump’s “mean” tweets and rhetoric, while ignoring his successful first term achievements both at home and abroad. It also required burnishing Biden’s decades of mediocrity and trimming, his gaffes and plagiarism, his unseemly attention to women and girls, and the stench of corruption wafting from his career.

The stench included Hunter Biden, whose scandals that involved Joe himself were swept under the rug by a complicit media. Nevertheless, Thornton recounts:

The Dems and the media pulled Biden across the finish line, leaving another bad odor of electoral anomalies the bipartisan establishment keeps declaring is actually the stink of conspiracy theories that — without a thorough investigation conducted to settle the issue — they somehow know are in fact MAGA fantasies. Biden took office, and immediately began undoing Trump’s successes, as if to show that his policies, like his confected “presidential” persona, will be the antitheses of Trump’s.

In just eight months, we have now a record with which we can judge that governing principle.

That record is terrible. Thornton starts with climate change, emissions regulations, and energy production, moving on to Biden’s crisis at the border. Oh, and there’s the Afghanistan debacle, after which Biden allowed tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans into our country, all while abandoning allies.

These are just [some] examples of how destructive the anti-Trump delirium has been and continues to be. Trump’s success exposed just how insular and jealous of its status the bipartisan managerial elite are. It wasn’t just Trump’s actions that were offensive, but his mere existence. Trump challenged all the so-called “norms” of governing, the standards reflecting the technocratic assumptions and political guild protocols of postwar politics. …

Worst of all, Trump’s success exposed the political ruling class and their hypocritical bipartisan norms and shared received wisdom. But the hatred and resentment of Trump is so deep that we now have a ruling party whose main principle is to do the opposite of whatever Trump did no matter how much it benefitted the country. Biden’s disastrous anti-Trump policies and failures demonstrate the dangers that such an irrational reflex can create.

Read the whole thing here.