An Open Appeal to Joe Biden: Don’t Wait Until November

The United States should not be this broken.

Our failure to respond proactively to the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic has hobbled our already ailing economy and led to the needless deaths of over 100,000 Americans.

It’s just yet another opportunity Donald Trump was handed he subsequently fumbled.

Now, in the midst of the pandemic for which there is still no cure, still no ability to test every one of us 330 million people, or robust contact tracing, our racist criminal justice system has once again descended us into civil unrest.

Here was another opportunity for Donald Trump he similarly fumbled.

Trump is the third president in our history to be impeached, the first Republican and first in his first term.

17 federal agencies confirm Russian assistance in his election in which he lost the popular vote by three million and proved the Electoral College needs to find its way to history’s ash heap once and for all.

We still haven’t seen his tax returns.

He is firing inspectors general for doing their jobs overseeing their respective agencies lest they find anything incriminating.

He has lied over 18,000 times.

He daily stokes the flames of racial violence, political division, and malicious indifference to anything resembling logic, compassion, and facts.

He defends police and white supremacist violence.

He threatens his political opponents and the press.

He courts fascists.

He is caging asylum seekers in concentration camps.

The list goes on.

Time after time after time, Trump is presented opportunities to be an actual leader, and time after time after time he has proven himself to be the exact opposite.

As Dr. Cornel West said in a Sunday interview on Fox News Sunday (which must have been very uncomfortable for the network):

“We’re witnessing the collapse of the legitimacy of leadership, the political class, the economic class, the professional class, that’s the deeper crisis.”

Yet, for some reason Trump leads Joe Biden 51% to 44% in the Republican-led states he won in 2016.

That’s why I am appealing openly to Vice President Joe Biden to begin behaving like a shadow president today.

Now.

Not in the fall.

The United States does not have a president at the moment.

Therefore, Joe Biden can be the face and the voice we need at this moment.

He doesn’t need to sit in the Oval Office to appeal for peace.

He doesn’t need Congress to approve a call for an end to our divisions and a start to the examination of our systemic economic and racial inequalities.

He doesn’t need to wait until the fall to start laying out policy positions that will set him apart from Trump.

He doesn’t need to wait until he’s officially the nominee to expose Trump’s incompetence.

He doesn’t need to wait until January 20, 2021 to begin fixing what Trump has already broken.

By then he will have broken much more.

We are swiftly marching toward autocracy.

Please, Vice President Biden, we need to hear from you every day as we do from NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo about the coronavirus.

We need a leader, not a racist tweeter.

Image credit: www.theindianweekly.com.au

Ted Millar is writer and teacher. His work has been featured in myriad literary journals, including Better Than Starbucks, The Broke Bohemian, Straight Forward Poetry, Caesura, Circle Show, Cactus Heart, Third Wednesday, and The Voices Project. He is also a contributor to The Left Place blog on Substack, and Medium.