1. Acknowledge that he has the perfect background because anyone who has worked for McKinsey for two and a half years has witnessed evil in its native haunt.
2. Acknowledge that his support of a public option for health insurance might ensure that the chief pillar of American health care is no longer GoFundMe.
3. Know that anyone who has made dozens of dangerous forays into Kabul could probably handle a working lunch with Lauren Boebert.
4. Re-frame his failure to connect with Black voters as an exciting opportunity to tap a V.P. who’s more charismatic (Cory Booker), passionate (Jasmine Crockett), or fun, fun, fun (Tiffany Haddish).
5. Acknowledge that someone who played Theseus in a high-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has experience being the voice of sanity in the midst of a shitstorm.
6. Acknowledge that, even though Masha Gessen has called him “a straight man in a gay man’s body,” his presidency would, in the aggregate, make the Oval less square.
7. Conclude that his vision for debt-free college might expand the average graduate student’s diet beyond Twizzlers and Cup o’ Noodles.
8. Concede that someone who hates the way his husband folds shirts is someone who, despite being an internationally recognized leader, bleeds like you and me.
9. Know that someone who has slowed down traffic and widened sidewalks is someone who is thinking about us big-bottomed pedestrians.
10. Know that, if a reality-TV show were ever to be spun off his presidency, it would not be called Epstein Island.
11. Know that he’s unlikely to amplify a rumor that his predecessor was replaced by a robot clone, if only because he knows that a robot cannot be a clone.
12. Know that if he ever appointed a Health and Human Services secretary who tells Congress, “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” he’d have the decency to activate a whoopee cushion or make a “womp-womp” sound in order to recast the statement as broad comedy.
13. Know that if he ever referred to the prospect of Canada becoming the 51st state as “a wonderful marriage,” viewers would not immediately wonder, Is he an authority on this topic?
14. Know that if Meet the Press ever asked him whether he had to uphold the Constitution, he’d gin up a better answer than “I don’t know,” because he’d realize he wasn’t on an episode of Presidents Say the Darndest Things.
15. Hope that the first First Gentleman will single-handedly strip the White House’s new $200 million gilt ballroom back to natural grains in a process called “the Chastening.”
Henry Alford is a New York–based writer and the author of I Dream of Joni
