RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Biden, as we well know, is of good Irish Catholic stock, his speeches sprinkled with the emerald argot of his heritage, a lush, hibernian wordscape of shenanigans and malarkey. But he’s an ecumenical sort too, so I know he’ll forgive a little cultural dissonance when I say that this may be one of the finest examples of chutzpah in modern political rhetoric.

For four years the bulk of his Democratic Party, a good deal of the permanent government and almost the entire cultural establishment of the country has treated the Trump presidency as an occupying enemy.

Donald Trump’s election four years ago was not greeted with civic deference to the urgent primacy of national unity that is now demanded of him and his supporters. It was greeted with the formation of a “resistance,” a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost.

The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposal—bureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news media—to thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.

In the past six months, the country descended into an abyss of pandemic-driven misery and social unrest. Like any good revolutionary movement, the resistance seized its moment. It launched a sustained, rolling campaign of disruptive demonstration and street violence, all dutifully enabled by Democrat-controlled city governments and all conveyed helpfully by a cooperative media as “peaceful protest.”