Biden Tricked Us Into Believing “Back to Normal” Was the Answer

Jan 27, 2026

white and black labeled pack — Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Living a year into the second nightmare known as Trump 2.0 has me thinking back to the decisions that led us here. So much shit is getting worse instead of better. Meanwhile this motherfucker in the White House is approving crimes against humanity, renaming the Kennedy Center after himself, and adorning the White House in gold like some kind of discount Sun King.

This is a nightmare. I want to blame everyone who looked the other way. I want to blame everyone who didn’t believe this man said what he said. I want to blame everyone who thought, “it’s about them, not me.”

I also want to blame us—and myself—for believing the lie Biden sold us on. We were so drained and exhausted from Trump 1.0 that Biden came in and said, “just vote for me, I’ll bring it back to normal.” And we fell for it. We thought, yes! Back to normal. Somehow that’ll be better than this crisis.

We were wrong.

The Lie of “Normal”

The phrase Biden was channeling has a troubling history. Warren G. Harding won the 1920 election in a landslide by promising “a return to normalcy” after World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. Americans wanted a president they could ignore, one who wouldn’t rock the boat. Harding delivered—until his administration was exposed as a massive tangle of corruption in the Teapot Dome scandal.

A century later, Biden didn’t explicitly recycle Harding’s slogan, but he called Trump’s presidency “an aberrant moment in time” and promised voters they could return to the familiar, the comfortable, the known. The implicit message was clear: Trump was a glitch in the matrix. Remove him, and everything would be fine.

But here’s what that framing conveniently ignores: the “normal” we were supposedly returning to was never good enough. Not even close.

What Was “Normal” Actually Like?

Let’s be clear about what “normal” America looked like before Trump ever descended that golden escalator:

The Obama administration deported more than 2.7 million people—more deportations than any president in decades. Obama earned the title “Deporter in Chief” from immigration advocates. The Border Patrol under Obama was already being criticized by the ACLU for brutality. Democrats in Congress spoke of their outrage in 2016 that ICE agents had been “terrorizing immigrant communities.” The enforcement infrastructure that Trump would later weaponize? It was built and expanded under Democratic administrations.

Wealth inequality had already reached Gilded Age levels. Since the 1980s, essentially all of the economic gains from America’s increasing productivity have gone to the elite and upper-middle class while workers’ real wages remained flat. By 2013, the top 3% of Americans held 54% of all wealth, while the bottom 90% had seen their share drop from 33% in 1989 to just 25%. The American Dream was already broken before Trump showed up to piss on the pieces.

Black Americans were being killed by police with impunity. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. All before Trump. The Movement for Black Lives emerged because “normal” meant Black people dying in the streets at the hands of the state.

The 2008 financial crisis had already exposed how the system worked for Wall Street and against everyone else. Banks got bailed out. Regular people lost their homes. Nobody went to prison. That was “normal.”

Biden’s Promise Was Always a Fantasy

The fundamental assumption behind Biden’s 2020 campaign was that Trump was an anomaly, a one-time aberration that could simply be voted away. Get back to normalcy, and we’d all be fine.

But Trump wasn’t an aberration. He was a symptom. A symptom of decades of neoliberal economic policies that gutted the middle class. A symptom of a political system captured by corporate interests. A symptom of institutional racism that had never been addressed. A symptom of a country that never reckoned with its founding sins.

You don’t cure symptoms by ignoring them. You don’t heal a wound by pretending it doesn’t exist.

And Biden, the centrist deal-maker, the man who spent decades in the Senate writing the 1994 Crime Bill and the bank-friendly bankruptcy bill, was never going to be the person to perform the surgery this country actually needed.

Progressives warned us. During the 2020 primary, activists at Netroots Nation argued that Biden was potentially the worst option for the party, that Democrats were repeating the mistakes of 2016. “If you can afford for the world not to change, you take the slow approach,” one organizer said. “If you’re a privileged few that can wait for Medicare for All, then maybe you can be a moderate, but we don’t have time for that.”

They were right. We didn’t have time. And now we’re out of it.

What We Actually Needed

What we needed was not back to normal. What we needed was a complete dismantling of the structure from top to bottom. We needed to acknowledge that the America of 2020 was built on centuries of slavery, lynching, forced deportations that happened long before Trump, systemic racism, corporate Wall Street greed, and the calculated destruction of labor power.

We needed universal healthcare—not a patched-up Affordable Care Act. We needed police abolition or at minimum complete reconstruction—not reform. We needed a Green New Deal—not incremental climate promises. We needed reparations for Black Americans—not symbolic gestures. We needed immigration reform that treated people as human beings—not more enforcement dressed up in humanitarian language.

We needed radical change because the problems were radical. They went to the root. And you cannot solve root problems with surface treatments.

Where We Are Now

Instead, we got Biden. We got four years of compromise, of reaching across the aisle to people who wanted to burn the building down. We got the same basic economic structure, the same immigration enforcement apparatus, the same fundamental power arrangements.

And now look at us.

Trump is back. The Kennedy Center—a living memorial to an assassinated president, established by an act of Congress—has been renamed after a man who installed himself as its chairman and filled the board with his cronies. When Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty tried to voice her opposition to the name change during the “unanimous” vote, she was muted on the call.

The White House has been transformed into what critics call a “gilded rococo hellscape,” with golden flourishes everywhere—on the fireplace, the doorways, the ceiling, Trump’s own coasters bearing his name. He’s modeling himself on Louis XIV, the Sun King, while paving over the Rose Garden to build a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago and planning a $200 million ballroom modeled on Versailles.

Meanwhile, immigration detention has reached record levels—over 60,000 people in ICE custody. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined. Over 70% of current detainees have no criminal convictions. People are being arrested at immigration court hearings, at routine ICE check-ins, at their jobs, in their communities. A music teacher left his elementary school students and fled to Spain because he was afraid of being detained even though he had valid humanitarian parole.

International law scholars are writing academic papers arguing that what’s happening constitutes a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute. And Trump has floated the idea of deporting and imprisoning American citizens abroad—a proposal that legal scholars describe as “crossing a bright line” in how the U.S. government treats its own people.

This is where “back to normal” got us.

The Reckoning We Refuse to Have

The hardest truth is that Biden’s lie was also our lie. We wanted to believe that everything would be okay. We wanted to believe that voting for the safe choice would save us. We wanted to believe that we could go back to brunch, that politics could fade into the background, that our institutions would hold.

We wanted normal because normal meant we didn’t have to fight anymore.

But the fight was never optional. The struggle against injustice, against inequality, against authoritarianism—it doesn’t end. You don’t get to clock out. The forces that created Trump didn’t disappear when Biden took office. They regrouped. They planned. They came back stronger.

And we were unprepared because we’d been told the crisis was over.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I don’t have clean answers. I wish I did. But I know this much: we cannot afford to be tricked again. We cannot settle for candidates who promise to return us to a status quo that was already failing most of us. We cannot accept a political framework that treats symptoms instead of causes.

The problems we face—fascism, climate catastrophe, economic inequality, systemic racism—are not problems that can be solved by incremental change. They require transformation. They require us to imagine a different world and then fight to build it.

That might sound naive. It might sound unrealistic. But what’s truly unrealistic is expecting different results from the same approach that has failed us over and over again.

Jordan Robison

Discussion about this post

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Jordan Robison

Biden Tricked Us Into Believing “Back to Normal” Was the Answer

The Lie of “Normal”

What Was “Normal” Actually Like?

Biden’s Promise Was Always a Fantasy

What We Actually Needed

Where We Are Now

The Reckoning We Refuse to Have

Where Do We Go From Here?

Sources and Resources

Biden’s “Return to Normalcy” Campaign

Obama-Era Immigration Enforcement

Economic Inequality and Neoliberalism

Progressive Critiques During 2020 Primary

Trump 2.0: Kennedy Center Renaming

Trump 2.0: White House Gold Decor

Trump 2.0: Immigration Enforcement and Human Rights

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?