The best editorial cartoon of the week shows Ivanka with Don Jr. and Eric in front of a TV where members of Biden’s new cabinet are being introduced, and the clueless Ivanka exclaims, “Wait. Those aren’t Biden’s children!” It’s by Mike Thompson of USA Today.

Right you are, Ivanka! How gaslighted we’ve become to accept the bizarre makeup of the White House under Trump for how a country should be run! (Gaslighting has become a term of contemporary usage these Trump years, referring to a classic 1944 film with Ingrid Bergman playing a wife being slowly poisoned by her evil husband such that as she sinks toward death, she never really knows what’s happening to her. Trumpian toxicity has been doing that to us.)

The team that President-elect Biden has put together is an A-Team of talent and acumen, what a presidential cabinet should look like. What’s astonishing here is how twisted things in the White House have become, revealed only by the bold steps Biden has taken so far for a return to normal, or as it has been aptly stated, to a climate whereby America can “build back better.”

While nothing about what’s come out of the White House the last four years should shock us, many aspects will still be astonishing and continue to dazzle and amaze us as we recover from our gaslighting. Among them, as folks line up to apply for jobs in the new administration, is the discovery of how few executive branch positions were actually ever filled by Trump. He really did have no interest in applying the energy and concentration required to run this country, instead preferring us to watch his big fat derriere chip away at golf balls while his minions stole more and more from the public dole.

He’s been too dumb and selfish in the process to be much of a Russian agent, although he did and will continue to do things to strengthen Putin’s hand. His latest stunt has been to pull the U.S. out of the Open Skies Treaty and to destroy the planes we used in that effort, thereby empowering the Russians, among other things, to build up undetected for an invasion of Europe. But we can be confident our extremely skilled national intelligence teams have unfolded measures to correct for that. Our intelligence agencies are the true heroes of these last four years, keeping the stupendously f*d up Trump and his cohorts contained such that we are not all nuclear powder by now. There was a lot of double overtime in that.

Going forward the nation needs to double down on the flaws that were allowed over the last half-century to fester into the puss-laden mess that the White House has become. Freedom that does not favor the best over the worst in us is a prescription for disaster. We need to put a lot of thought into what that means.