Goodbye, Good Governance. Hello, Insane Promises.

The Biden interregnum closes. Trumpian chaos returns.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

SOMETIMES THERE’S A DAY THAT SUMS UP AN ERA. On Friday, it only took a morning.

At 9:30 a.m., Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing for his 34 felony convictions got underway in Justice Juan Merchan’s Manhattan courtroom. No prison or fines or confinement—the voters have spoken!—so it was largely symbolic.

In Washington an hour earlier, at 8:30 a.m., the Bureau of Labor Statistics had released a stellar jobs report. Big whoop, right? What’s one more stellar jobs report after months and months of them? What’s another 256,000 new jobs? A number that not only “blew past forecasts,” as the New York Times put it, but was over double what economists had projected?

You can probably guess what happened next: Page 1 stories about Trump’s scandalous milestone, and President Joe Biden’s final jobs report buried on A12, or B1, or wherever. Whatever.

To be fair, Trump will be America’s first felon-in-chief, which is quite an achievement. Yet Biden has made history of his own: The economy added jobs every full month that he was in office, the first time that’s happened since the government began collecting data in 1939. “Zero months with job losses,” said his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.

Which man’s precedent had more impact on people’s lives? Biden’s, hands-down, and in a good way.

Which one was more compelling as reality TV? Trump’s—if you like your entertainment contentious and tawdry, with subplots about hush money, business fraud, and possibly determinative interference in an election over eight years ago.

Faced with that choice, American voters made their preference clear in 2024. Or maybe they just revealed that they haven’t been paying any attention at all for the last decade. One way to make it make sense, at least a little, is by applying a theory I’ve developed from covering dozens of presidential candidates and campaigns over the years: On some level, voters react to personalities and pick the person least like the current officeholder.

For instance: Jimmy Carter was a detail-oriented and sometimes painfully frank policy wonk who was recognized much later as innovative and forward looking in energy, defense and other arenas. He was followed by Ronald Reagan, an experienced actor, negotiator and communicator who had the presence and charisma that Carter lacked, and was famous for thinking about the big picture and not attending to the details.

Next up, George H.W. Bush, another charisma-challenged president (“Message: I care” was a classic fail) whose record has aged well—from signing the Americans with Disabilities Act and quickly driving Iraq out of Kuwait to his deficit deal and managing the end of the Cold War. And then, like clockwork, Americans elected Bill Clinton—with his compelling communications skills, deep policy wonkery, and televised confession of causing “pain in my marriage.”

Then came George W. Bush, who barely won in 2000—a funny, sarcastic, heavy drinker-turned-teetotaler who ran as a “compassionate conservative” and aspired to be an education president. Instead, the self-described “gut player” relying on his instincts waged a two-front global war on terror after the 9/11 attacks. Not surprisingly, the cerebral Barack Obama—restrained and deliberative, sometimes maddeningly so—was America’s next choice.

Also not surprising in retrospect is that Trump, the opposite of Obama in many ways, came next. Or that he was followed by Biden, Obama’s vice president and a Trump corrective. Biden’s economic record in office will stand the test of time, but Trump’s upcoming second inauguration is proof that while Biden provided a respite, he failed to permanently restore norms or protect democracy.

Trump’s return fits the pattern of careening from one personality type to the other and back, but I still can’t fathom the results given that as a nation, we know Trump so well. Whatever happened to judging people on character, competence, or both?

And why on earth choose someone who has neither? Are voters still, a decade into the MAGA era, judging candidates on how persuasively they make inane promises (I’ll end the Ukraine war in one day; I’ll singlehandedly reduce food prices) or float insane ideas (let’s buy Greenland; let’s annex Canada)? How does any of that compete with a larger, stronger NATO, more clean energy jobs and semiconductor manufacturing, and a real commitment to roads, bridges, ports, airports, the electric grid, and rural broadband?

Maybe people believed Trump’s strongman fantasies about driving costs down to what they were years ago—which he acknowledged recently are, indeed, fantasies. And Biden’s industrial policy advances obviously do not produce the same adrenaline rush as culture wars. Compromise and bipartisanship are dull compared with fiery battles within and between political parties.

There’s no question that governing is boring. But there’s also no question that we’ll miss it when it’s gone.