We danced in the streets when Joe Biden was elected. Do you remember? American cities staged the greatest spontaneous outpouring of joy since V-J Day with cars honking and strangers high-fiving one another on an unusually warm November weekend. When I ventured down to Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., on a Sunday night, a day and a half after the election had been called, the street party was still going. That was just three years ago.

I would estimate that a very tiny percentage of the joy was attributable to specific policy objectives of the incoming Biden administration and that virtually all of it reflected relief that the bad man was gone. The 81,268,924 voters who pulled the lever for Biden were united by the belief that Donald Trump’s presidency was a civic emergency.

Despite countless op-eds and campaign ads warning of the threat that a second Trump term poses to the democratic order, the imperative to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has become tiresome. The signs of that exhaustion are everywhere in our politics today. It may be the most dominant attribute of our national mood.