Race

If Donald Trump loses in November – and it’s a very big if, of course – then under Joe Biden, it will be hard for the United States not to be seduced into collective amnesia. The Trump presidency has represented such a thorough subversion of political norms that, with a Biden victory, the temptation to move on from it as swiftly as possible will be strong.Already the signs are beginning to appear. The polls look encouraging for the Democrats, coronavirus is ravaging the country and Trump is unravelling a little more every day as he tries, and fails, to prove that he is “cognitively there” in TV interviews. The temptation is to indulge in a sort of fast-forwarding to the future, where Trump is a blip, the first and last of his kind. In a town hall meeting last week, Biden said: “We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”But 12 presidents, among them George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson, owned slaves. Others presided over segregation. Biden’s disavowal of racism in the most powerful office of the land is a piece of ahistoricism brought on by the need to believe that Trump is a singular monstrosity. The idea is that his toxicity can be cleansed with his ejection from the White House.This reassurance is, after all, what Biden is there for. His weakness as a Democratic candidate has turned into a strength in a period of heightened uncertainty. Here is a pastoral, non-controversial figure, who will not subject a traumatised country to any more sudden shocks. The purpose of his presidency would be restorative, the idea to return the US back to “normal”. Trump was just a long, vivid nightmare. Chroniclers of the US’s journey are already preparing to write this account of a country that can be managed back to health. The Johns Hopkins University professor Yascha Mounk tweeted that if the current polls holds and “Biden crushes Trump”, then “a lot of people are gonna have to change their narrative about America quite a lot”. He concluded that they probably wouldn’t, all the same.Nor should they. The conditions that brought Trump to power and kept his poll ratings pretty much level throughout allegations of sexual assault, impeachment and indulgence of white supremacy will not have disappeared overnight. And even though Trump’s departure, whenever it happens, will be enormously welcome, he did at least force a moment of national self-confrontation. He revealed that white supremacy is always waiting in the wings, ready to be emboldened. He revealed the extent to which many Americans don’t care about morality in foreign policy. He took Russia’s word about its interference over that of his own intelligence agencies – and in getting away with it, showed that his supporters’ xenophobia was more powerful than their patriotism.As long as he was dogwhistling against black people, Mexicans and Muslims, his betrayals would be forgiven. These are painful things to acknowledge. They run so contrary to the foundational myth of America, to its comforting rhetoric and its political sacraments, that the business of trivialising them must begin at once if the country is to heal after Trump goes.Getting back to normal after periods of abject moral failure is one of the US’s strengths. When the Senate select committee on intelligence released its damning report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” programme, concluding that the CIA avoided oversight and lied about the efficacy of torture, there was no punishment for anyone involved. The programme, during which one detainee died of hypothermia and another lost an eye, was “troubling” according to Barack Obama. The report was even presented as evidence that the US’s ideals were intact. “No nation is perfect,” Obama said, “but one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better.”The same will happen if Trump loses later this year. An image-laundering exercise, where the US will appoint itself as judge and jury, but no sentence will be meted out. It will investigate his time in office, soberly declare that failures happen, then pat itself on the back for rejecting him.In 2016, it was a challenge to accept that Trump won for any reason other than the economic disaffection of rust-belt voters. Just as this “calamity thesis” dominated the aftermath of Trump’s victory, the idea that he is simply an anomaly will carry the day if he loses. But Trump is a culmination, not an aberration. The point in hoping the US doesn’t move on too quickly isn’t to self-flagellate. If there is no reckoning with what this presidency says about the country, another version of him, and all the dark forces he unleashed, will be back in short order.• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More