It’s been said many times: Leaving Trump behind feels like emerging from an abusive relationship, or perhaps renewing one’s relationship with a former BFF (America) after she leaves her sh*tty man.

After all, Trump is a classic abuser. He gaslights, he lies, he cheats, and he is leaving behind an America with 200,000 people dead and more dying every day. He never admits his mistakes, creating a vicious cycle wherein he does something atrocious, gets a tan, and then shows up smiling with flowers (or in his case, a last-minute attempt to curry favor with the Black community by befriending several aging rappers).

Many Americans are still under his spell, and there’s not much a lot of us can do about it. People in abusive relationships are often in denial about what’s happening to them, and they often won’t leave until they decide to. Shaming someone in an abusive relationship is rarely an effective way to get them out of it, as they’ve likely already been shamed many times.

Concerned friends and family can get into as many Facebook arguments with Trumpets as we want, but until they decide they deserve better and it’s time to leave, there’s really not too much we can do for them. All we can do is offer a safe place where they can run to, should they choose to escape. (Of course, we must remember that many Trumpers can be abusive as well).

Anyway, all this is to say that now we’re finally kicking Trump out. America, we have decided to free ourselves. And we have the next few months to prepare for a new man to move in: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Settling for Joe, Dreaming of Bernie

I know I’m not alone in saying that Joe Biden isn’t my dream man. For a long time, I was hoping that Bernie Sanders would sweep me off my feet on an elderly white horse, a joint billowing from his hand. He would take me to the hospital where I would finally get my wisdom teeth removed for free thanks to Medicare For All, and then we would go to Jeff Bezos’s house, demand a few billion dollars (just hand it over, Jeff, it’ll save you a lot of time in court), and make a couple large donations to community organizers.

But alas, that was always a fantasy—and much like my childhood fantasy of dating Joe Jonas during his Camp Rock years, some things are simply not meant to be.

Now we have Joe Biden. I still don’t know all that much about the man, relatively speaking, but I know he’s not nearly as dangerous as Donald Trump. When I heard he was the nominee, I thought that if anything, he might just be a do-nothing type of politician who would have to be bullied by mass movements into taking any sort of action at all.

But at least, I hoped, he would clean up some of the mess Trump made during one of his many fits of rage. At least there would be no more 5 AM tweet storms. At least his gang of weird friends from Fox News would stop stealing from my fridge and destroying America’s stature in the rest of the world’s eyes.

But upon seeing Joe Biden’s new website, I’m feeling something strange and unfamiliar. It’s not quite butterflies, but it’s close—perhaps the faint buzzing of the fly that ended Mike Pence.

The website looks…nice. It’s been so long since a political platform showed up wearing a suit and holding flowers instead of brandishing a gun at me and threatening to demolish gay rights.

COVID-19

Scrolling through, I actually agree with most of what the website says. I mean, first of all, there’s the COVID-19 plan. A COVID plan. A plan! It’s not an Elizabeth Warren-level plan, sure, but it’s still an actual plan with steps.

Trump had no plan. If anything, his plan was to keep golfing as he let COVID-19 keep raging across the country. States across the nation probably would’ve shut down again, over and over again each winter for years, because not every state is willing to just…let everyone catch COVID-19. This disease would have continued for another four years to forever. The death toll, the overcrowded hospitals…The nightmare would have gone on, and on, and on.

It’s unclear as to whether Joe Biden will effectively stop COVID-19, but dammit, it’s nice to know there is a plan–one that’s comprised of actual words, to boot.

It’s also incredibly relieving to hear someone say they will “ensure public health decisions are informed by public health professionals.” This is like if you were dating some guy who’s willing to let you lie on the couch bleeding out because he didn’t feel like driving you to the ER, but then Joe Biden popped in and said the Uber is on its way. (Yeah, we can’t quite expect affordable ambulances with a Biden healthcare plan, but I’ll take what I can get).

Biden has promised to set up a Pandemic Testing Board and a U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps to mobilize community contract tracing. He’s going to use the Defense Production Act. He’s going to call on Congress to pass an emergency relief package and a “restart package” that helps businesses cover COVID-19 related costs. He’s going to build infrastructure to prevent future pandemic threats. He’s going to fund schools and small businesses.

And, incredibly, Biden’s COVID-19 plan involves science. (How beautiful it is to hear that word: “science”…used correctly…)

Climate Change

I’ve always had a type, and that type is musicians and/or climate activists. I didn’t think Joe Biden was either, but his climate plan is music to my ears.

Biden knows climate change is an existential threat. He knows that the “current COVID-19 pandemic reminds us how profoundly the energy and environmental policy decisions of the past have failed communities” and “at this moment of profound crisis, we have the opportunity to build a more resilient, sustainable economy—one that will put the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050.”

An irreversible path to net-zero emissions. Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord—and vamping them up. Creating millions of green jobs. Environmental Justice. Talk. Clean. Energy. To. Me.

True, these are fairly logical, necessary steps to that must be taken if we are to combat climate change, the paramount existential threat of our time, and it will take even more radical action to prevent irreparable destruction. It’s sad that we have to celebrate someone doing the bare minimum, using basic logic, and practicing public decency, but here we are.

Maybe I’ve just gotten so used to preparing for hurricanes and wildfires and being treated like sh*t that I’ve lowered my expectations to subterranean bunker-levels. And maybe I am too naive.

It’s probably naive to believe any of this will be possible or that any real change will happen with Biden. But given that the ex-president mostly communicated through all-caps rage-tweets, this is a nice change.

Economic Recovery

Biden also has an economic recovery plan. “The pandemic has also laid bare some unacceptable truths. Even before COVID-19, too many families were struggling to make ends meet and too many parents were worried about the economic future for their children,” writes whoever wrote the copy for Biden’s website.

“Laid bare”: That’s the phrase that every single one of my favorite journalists has used to describe the effects of COVID-19. Biden steals phrases from reputable journalists rather than from cracked-out Floridian moguls paying for rooms at Mar-A-Lago in order to gain favors from the president.

Wow, my expectations are really, really, really low. I mean, goddammit, the ex-president has failed at countless business ventures and has been bailed out time and time again. He’s like Pete Davidson in this recent SNL sketch, who claims he’s working on a “start-up” only for you to later find out that his “angel investor” is ghosting him.

Visiting Grandma – SNLwww.youtube.com

Trump is a criminal who didn’t even pay his taxes. He’s literally Keith from this other SNL sketch (a not-so-subtle metaphor for Trump), and America is Ego Nwodim, somehow considering actually taking him back (until the cops show up).

Take Me Back – SNLwww.youtube.com

Biden’s economic plan promises to “provide state, local, and tribal governments with the aid they need so educators, firefighters, and other essential workers aren’t being laid off.” The plan also promises to “mobilize American talent and heart to build a 21st century caregiving and education workforce.” He included carework and education—traditionally undervalued and under-recognized forms of essential work—in his economic plan.

Hopefully, with Jill Biden at the helm rather than Betsy DeVos, America’s education and caregiving systems will improve so that more people of all genders have equal opportunities to ascend to the highest office in the land.

At the very, very least, there will be a dog back in the White House.

Racial Equality

Biden also has a plan to “mobilize across the board to advance racial equity in America.” That’s right: No more creepy, covert-but-kind-of-overt white supremacy implicit in the presidential platform.

Now, we have Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, as our VP! Sure, she might have a background in criminal prosecution, and representation doesn’t equal reparations, but you know…it’s still way, way better than that really disturbing “stand back and stand by” stuff we dealt with for four years.

There’s an entire section on racial equality. There’s a plan for police reform. We’re doing the bare minimum rather than regressing at an exponential pace.

Let’s not forget that racism is deeply ingrained in the fabric of America, and white people overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Also, this kind of change has been promised before, and we have been let down many times. There’s a lot of work to do.

We aren’t out of the woods yet—far from it. But for this one glowing weekend, the dense pines cleared and we saw a sky full of shooting stars. It didn’t actually help anyone pay for their kids’ food or clear their astronomical healthcare bills; but it’s a promise and a chance to imagine that one day, we might make it out.

America Deserves Better

Joe Biden is not the patron saint of hope, equality, and change. In all honesty, it completely makes sense that a lot of people all along the political spectrum aren’t excited about him. He’s not exactly the guy of our dreams. And America does deserve better.

But hopefully, Joe Biden will be there over the next few years as we bind our wounds and heal the burns from our terrible spray tans. He’ll give us time to get a couple makeovers, a la Tutar in the Borat sequel. He’ll help us rebuild, and hopefully next time the election rolls around, we’ll have found our footing as a strong, powerful nation that doesn’t need a man at all.

Of course, many powerful villains remain. There’s America’s resident zombie-ghoul, Mitch McConnell, who has long been blocking Democrats’ every effort to make real change. Even though the man is rotting from the inside out—perhaps his hatred has at last calcified into a visible plague?—we haven’t been able to exorcise that particular demon yet. (Kentucky…we’ll be ready to elect Charles Booker when you need us, but we can’t help you until you help yourself).

And in truth, we will never heal until we learn to love ourselves, America. We can’t rely on another old white man to fix us. We have to turn to our people, our communities, and mass movements. We have to decide what we want our future to look like, and go get it.

It’s clear that it will take a lot more than a president-elect to wring out some of America’s lingering, ongoing traumas. We’ll need therapy, certainly, and a lot of it. Hopefully all those freshly legalized drugs will help with our collective depression.

At some point, we’ll actually have to engage with the deep traumas and early childhood wounds that led us into these kinds of relationships in the first place. We have to confront the mistakes of our forefathers and foremothers, the slavery and colonization and colonialism that created the attachment issues and socio-psychological defects that drew us to men like Trump. We have to be the ones that change our lives in order to change our nation.

But that’s a tall order, and we’re all tired. So for now, I’m just going to keep gazing lovingly at the work of Biden’s excellent web designer, who clearly knows how to pick a font and lay out an escape plan. I look forward to being mildly uninspired by Biden’s administrative staff picks rather than openly horrified.

It’s been a terrible time, America. For many of us, life has always been this way. But it’s late-stage 2020; the status quo is no more, and anything is possible. If you told me I’d be writing a thirsty essay about Joe Biden’s website in February 2020 I would have thrown my beer in your face then gone back to my awesome free concert (just kidding, I probably would’ve been right here on the Internet protected by net neutrality, but I digress).

Yes, I am pretty desperate right now, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. But I have faith in the organizers that have been working tirelessly to get us here, and I believe if we keep fighting, organizing, and working towards change, we’ll see a new world come to be.

For now, love is love, so I will continue to feel vaguely attracted to this website until climate change ends or I finally get my goddamned stimulus check.