"We could not imagine that Trump would become President, that he would sow disinformation and denial about a deadly virus, that he would attack the legitimacy of American democracy itself..."

"... rather than concede defeat. Over the past year, Biden has struggled with his own set of unimaginable challenges that became intractable realities. I lived in Russia for four years, where decades of life under the Soviet Union had taught a cynical population a truth that Americans only now seem to be learning for themselves: it can always get worse."

From "Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously/It was a brutal start for the new President" by Susan B. Glasser (in The New Yorker).