Joe Biden is betting the house on somehow convincing us bipartisanship is alive and well in the age of Trump

Is the Democrat front-runner playing some grand game of 16-dimensional chess, unfathomable to our tiny human minds – or is he just screwing up?

This weekend the Democratic frontrunner beguiled the American people with a few sentences. On 10 June at a fundraiser, Sam Stein reported that Joe Biden said the following “With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing."

It was one of those strange seminal moments were the American people had to asked themselves, “WHAT THE HELL IS JOE BIDEN TALKING ABOUT?”

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t believe Trumpism is a symptom of Republican rot, not the cause of it, and to argue otherwise is feckless foolishness. “This – what the GOP has become – is our real problem,” wrote Michael Tomasky. “Trump is and always has been just a manifestation of it. He has taken Republicans to unimaginable lows. But they’ve been demonstrating for years that they were delighted to go there.”

There is no Trumpism without Bill Barr obfuscation or the sycophancy of various Republican leaders. There is no Trumpism without years of Bushism.

Trumpism is a product of a perfect storm of Republican partisanship and conservative talk radio and racism that has long been bubbling under the surface.

So, what the hell is Joe Biden talking about then? As Ryan Bort pointed out in Rolling Stone, this isn’t the first time Biden has tried to convince voters that the US will “transform into a bipartisan utopia if only someone could defeat Trump in 2020.”

During a campaign stop in New Hampshire last month, Biden said that Republicans will have an “epiphany” once Trump leaves the White House. “I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the white house.”

Um, does Joe Biden remember the Tea Party, the Starr report, the many many many times Republicans held Democrats hostage? Does Joe not remember that during his tenure as vice president, the senate majority leader “king of the partisans” Mitch McConnell refused to even allow the senate to hold a vote on Obama’s supreme court nominee Merrick Garland?

Maybe Biden thinks his best bet to win is to sell himself as “the return to normalcy candidate”. And who knows, maybe it’ll work. Eric Levitz in New York Magazine points to polls that suggest more than 60 per cent of Democrats want a candidate likely to perform well against Donald Trump more than they want one who’s likely to support their key policy preferences.

Perhaps a return to normalcy includes a total denial of the partisan clusterfuckery that American politics has become? It seems counterintuitive but who knows? Democrats sure are desperate to rid themselves of Trumpism and perhaps the idea that he is a tumor to be excised rather than a metastasis of the system is more comforting to democratic primary voters?

Of course, the other possibility is that the old man is just not that good at this. There’s a lot of evidence to support this theory given that Joe Biden’s first presidential foray was back in 1988. He also is known for many assorted and sundry gaffes. The good news about running against trump is that gaffes don’t necessarily disqualify a person they way they might in a normal election cycle against a normal politician with a normal, fully functioning frontal cortex.

It’s possible that Joe Biden is playing 16-dimensional chess; that he truly knows what he’s doing; and that he has a plan to capture the undecided voters by floating the idea of utopian universe where Republicans are just under the magic spell of an orange colored reality television host. It’s also possible that the Democratic front runner is completely out of touch with reality.

The good news for Democrats is that there are 23 candidates, so this will be a competitive primary race. The bad news for Democrats is that there are 23 candidates so this will be an insane soul crushing primary race. Either way, all that matters to most Democrats is that the party picks a candidate who is capable of sending the mango Mussolini back to his golden penthouse in Trump tower.