Has there ever been a period in American history in the memory of almost all living people in which there has been so much change in the year since Donald Trump returned to the presidency in 2025? The whirlwind of change, both national and worldwide, is almost beyond comprehension. And in the midst of writing about all that shock over the sudden changes initiated by Trump, it is possible to slip up and make stunning admissions.
Such seemed to be the case with Politico senior executive editor Alexander Burns when he appeared to slip up on Monday in “Trump Buries the 20th Century” and concede that Joe Biden was dysfunctional:
This philistinism and historical ignorance was at the heart of Joe Biden’s case against Trump. Biden deplored Trump as an insult to the American political tradition and promised to make Washington work, repair broken norms and turn over power to the next generation. His slow-moving, self-admiring, politically dysfunctional administration achieved none of these things.
If there was a chance then to build a bridge to the 20th Century, Biden lost it.
The next time the country chooses a replacement for Trump, resurrecting the past won’t even be an option.
For American policymakers and voters, there’s no longer any prospect of mimicking détente with regimes in Iran and Cuba that are unraveling at this very hour. Barack Obama pursued that aim as part of his own 21st Century agenda; that path is now closed for good.
“Dysfunctional” aka incompetent.
It’s obvious that Burns meant to write 21st century, not 20th century — and yet his error somehow made the correct point. Namely, that Biden was so incompetent he couldn’t even figure out which century to build a bridge to. And that is somehow very believable to anybody who watched a very confused Biden struggle to figure how to exit multiple stages. But where was Politico in real time? They were apparently quietly unhappy with their “slow-moving, self-admiring” Democrat overlords.
This is not to say that Burns was complimentary towards Trump. Not when you begin words with a rant like this:
With a roar of rockets and bombs, a gasp of international outcry and the death of Iran’s supreme leader, President Donald Trump’s legacy became clearer than ever.
He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight.
Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition.
His Supreme Court appointees struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the seething political and legal stalemate on abortion rights that governed America since the 1970s.
His military interventions in Latin America have brought the Cuban government, one of the last surviving Cold War regimes, to the brink of collapse.
His tariffs and trade threats have blown apart the Reagan-Clinton policy consensus on free trade, upending half a century of global commercial arrangements and diplomatic relations.
His America First worldview and contempt for Europe’s political establishment have increasingly relegated NATO’s charter, the 1949 accord forging the globe’s most powerful military alliance, to antique status.
And if the America is changing and the world is changing due to Trump, is it possible that even Politico is changing? Just last summer Politico was on a TDS inflamed rampage to find something, ANYTHING, damaging to Trump in the Epstein files but within a few months some sanity set in and they sheepishly conceded nothing harmful to Trump would be found in those files.
Yes, just baby steps just as Monday’s concession about the competence of Joe Biden was a baby step. We shall see.
