As expected, President Trump has begun to accept the election results in which the American people, by about a six million-vote margin, said that they were ready to move on. East Hampton went for his opponents, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in a big way, winning each of the town’s 19 election districts, with absentee ballots (which lean heavily Democratic here) remaining to be counted. We attribute this to good sense and a sense of exhaustion at a four-year wasted opportunity. Other than presiding over a gutting of regulations and successfully nominating conservative judges and tipping the scales on the Supreme Court, the Trump presidency has been one more of scandal than substance. To be sure, he blames enemies in the media, Democratic conspiracies, and the like for his administration’s lackluster term, but the truth is simpler: Not once did he select the “best people,” as he claimed he had done, for key posts.
The Biden administration is already shaping up to be different. The nomination of Antony Blinken — a Boys Harbor counselor as a teen! — for secretary of state speaks of the president-elect’s commitment to experience and skill. Mr. Blinken, whose family summer home is still in East Hampton Village, became the deputy secretary of state in 2014 during the Obama administration’s second term. He was also a member of the White House transition team in 2009. If confirmed in the Senate, he would follow Mike Pompeo, who almost inconceivably vaulted from Kansas’s 4th Congressional District, representing Wichita, to leading the Central Intelligence Agency in 2017, and was made secretary of state the following year after Rex Tillerson had had enough.
Funny, it seems that it is Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who are actually choosing the “best people.”