Joe, Dr. Jill, and Hunter are packing up their stuff in the White House.
JOE: I can’t believe it’s ending this way.
JILL: Me, neither.
JOE: I keep wondering if I should have done something different. Should I have stayed in the race, or gotten out earlier?
JILL: It wouldn’t have mattered. The country hated inflation and blamed you for it. That decision was made long before the election. Even if you had gotten out earlier, the result would have been the same. Kamala couldn’t run as a popular incumbent, and she couldn’t run as a change agent. All she had was abortion and January 6. It wasn’t enough.
JOE: The worst thing is that I’ll go down in history as a footnote and a failure. My job was to keep Trump out, and in the end, I didn’t do it.
JILL: History will be kinder than that. Look at the elder George Bush. At the time, he looked like an out of touch patrician who didn’t finish off Saddam when he had the chance. Today, he looks like a really good president.
JOE: He won the Gulf War. What do I have?
JILL: You brought us back from the pandemic. You made investments that will be really important a decade from now. You saved Ukraine without starting World War III. That will look a lot better in hindsight.
HUNTER: And you pardoned me! That was your best move yet!
JOE: Somehow, I don’t think historians will agree on that.
JILL: Your only failure was to be a bad salesman. That was partly due to your age, and partly to your conscious desire not to hog the limelight like Trump. You wanted America to be normal again. Unfortunately, Americans were used to Trump, and they saw a vacuum instead of a normal country.
JOE: That’s true. I wonder if I should have made more of an effort to bash companies for price increases. If the public had associated me more clearly with the fight against inflation, things could have been different.
JILL: You weren’t cynical enough to do that. You knew that kind of grandstanding wouldn’t actually lower prices.
JOE: I bet Trump does it when his tariffs kick in. He’ll blame everyone but himself for the inflation he causes.
JILL: You can take that to the bank. Now, let’s get a move on; we only have a few days left.