President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Jennifer Granholm — former governor of Michigan, lawyer, politician and television host — to be the next secretary of energy is curious.

The idea circulating is that her primary assignment, in Biden’s mind, will be to speed Detroit’s development of electric vehicles.

That is hardly the job Granholm will find confronting her when she heads to the 7th floor of the Forrestal Building, a bare-and-square concrete structure across from the romantic Smithsonian Castle on Independence Avenue in Washington.

Secretary of energy is one of the most demanding assignments in the government. The Department of Energy is a vast archipelago of scientific, defense, diplomatic and cybersecurity responsibilities. Granholm’s biggest concern, in fact, won’t be energy but defense.

The DOE, nicknamed the Little Pentagon, is responsible for maintaining, upgrading and ensuring the working order of the nation’s nuclear weapons. A critical launch telephone will go with her everywhere. That is where much of the department’s $30 billion or so budget goes.

The energy secretary is responsible for the largest scientific organization on earth: the 17 national laboratories operated by the department. They aren’t only responsible for the nuclear weapons program but also for a huge, disparate portfolio of scientific inquiry, from better materials to fill potholes to carbon capture, storage and utilization; and from small modular reactors for electricity to nuclear power for space exploration.

The national labs are vital in cybersecurity, particularly to assure the integrity of the electric grid and the security of things like Chinese-made transformers and other heavy equipment.

The DOE has the responsibility for detecting nuclear explosions abroad, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, making wind turbines more efficient, and developing the nuclear power plants that drive aircraft carriers and submarines. The department makes weapons materials, like tritium, and supervises the enrichment of uranium.

DOE scientists are looking into the very nature of physical matter. They have worked on mapping the human genome and aided nano-engineering development.

Wise secretaries of energy have realized that not only are the national laboratories a tremendous national asset but they can also be the secretary’s shock troops, ready to do what they are asked — not always the way with career bureaucrats. Their directors are wired into congressional delegations, including California with Lawrence Livermore; Illinois with Argonne; New Mexico with Los Alamos and Sandia; Tennessee with Oak Ridge; South Carolina with Savannah River.

Verifying the START nuclear weapons treaty with Russia falls to the DOE as will, possibly, renegotiating it. Another job would be being part of any future negotiations with Iran over its nuclear materials. Likewise, the energy secretary would be involved if serious negotiations are started with North Korea.

An ever-present headache for Granholm will be the long-term management of nuclear waste from the civilian program as public opposition to the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is adamant. Also, she will be responsible for vast quantities of weapons-grade plutonium in various sites, but notably at the Pantex site in Texas and the Savannah River site in South Carolina before it is mixed with an inert substance for burial in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Then there are little things like the strategic petroleum reserve, the future of fracking, reducing methane emissions throughout the natural gas system, and bringing on hydrogen as a utility and transportation fuel.

DOE has been charged with facilitating natural gas and oil exports. Now those are subject to the objections of environmentalists.

Smart secretaries have built good relationships early with various Senate and House committees that have oversight of DOE.

James Schlesinger, the first secretary of energy, led the new department with a knowledge of energy from his time as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a knowledge of diplomatic nuclear strategy from his time as director of the CIA, and a knowledge of defense from his time as secretary of defense.

The only other star that has shone as brightly from the Forrestal Building was President Barack Obama’s energy secretary Ernie Moniz, a nuclear scientist from MIT who essentially took over the nuclear negotiations with Iran: He and Iranian negotiator Ali Akbar Salehi, a fellow MIT graduate, hammered out the agreement, which was a work of art, a pas de deux, by two truly informed nuclear aficionados.

Compared to the awesome reach of DOE in other vital areas, electric cars seem of little consequence, especially as Elon Musk with Tesla already has scaled that mountain, and all the car companies are scrambling up behind him.

When a nation goes to war its first step to survival is to protect the homeland against invasion. Every citizen is co-opted: It is their national duty.

We are on a war footing against COVID-19. It has invaded our homeland, and it is slaughtering us. Nearly 300,000 are dead and the vast hospital network in the United States is overwhelmed.

A dark cloud passes before our sun. Christmas promises more sorrow as we wait for reinforcements — in this case, the vaccine — to arrive.

The first line of defense against this common enemy, this indiscriminate killer, is a simple piece of layered cloth or paper held over the nose and mouth by cloth or elastic strings. It is a face mask, the simplest of defensive weapons.

But there is in the United States a tribe that has lost its head, reminiscent of Nicholas Monserrat’s great novel of 1956.

There are among us those who won’t defend their homeland, won’t wear masks, and accompany that treason by propagating a theory that to wear a mask is to grant a malign government total authority over the individual, and to bring about totalitarianism; or that to wear a mask is to cede manhood or endanger our way of life.

Worse, there are those who believe it is a political statement of solidarity with the outgoing administration, with the embattled president, and the raucous nationalism that is the core of his appeal.

Some won’t wear masks out of youthful chutzpah, believing this is a disease of the old and that the young and the healthy are immune.

This is a fiction they have been fed by those who should know better and most likely do know better, most of whom reside under Republican roofs, presided over by that Niagara Falls of disinformation, President Donald Trump.

While the nation is taking fatal casualties which it doesn’t need to take, while first responders and medical personal are thrown again and again into the breach, exhausted and scared, the Trump Republicans can’t bring themselves to join the battle.

While the signs of war — a war with a terrible count in deaths — rages on, congressional Republicans are foraging for scandals like pigs after truffles. Most of them still won’t condemn Trump for his super-spreader activities, like his rallies, parties and reckless behavior in public, which signal masks aren’t needed.

The trouble is that leaders of this headless tribe, this unacceptable face of what was the Grand Old Party, are so cowed that they won’t check the president.

The Republican Party used to be made up of muscular individuals, lawmakers who took their mandate seriously, not today’s pusillanimous followers.

Incredibly, most Republican members of Congress can’t bring themselves to admit that Joe Biden won the election and will be the next president. Had there been “massive voter fraud” this wouldn’t be so. The courts would have spoken other than as they have.

All of this has played into the anti-mask movement and its lethal consequences. The virus doesn’t ask party affiliation: It is an equal-opportunity slayer.

Then there is Trump’s great enabler in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Even as millions of Americans don’t know where the next meal will come from this Christmas besides a food bank, and rent and utility bills are unpaid, McConnell, and McConnell alone, will decide who gets relief, who gets the shaft for Christmas. He can just refuse to bring a bill to the floor and end it right there. His personal concerns are paramount, not those of the other members of Congress.

Not only does McConnell not wish to understand the gravity of the situation in the country, but he also seems to relish his ability to exacerbate it, to turn his job into a Lego game for his own amusement.

This will be a bleak Christmas lit by the hope that the vaccine will deliver us from despair and bottomless hurt.

But for the vaccine to vanquish the virus, we must get our shots. If the same idiocy that shuns masks prevails, the war won’t fully be won for years when it could be ended next year.

The sight of victory is the best Christmas present, and it is possible next year if we close ranks. Those who will bear the guilt are known. They are in Washington now.

This is the month when the national spirit should start to lift: COVID-19 vaccines could be administered by mid-December. While we won’t reach the summit of a mighty mountain this month, nor well into next year, the ascent will have begun.

It is unlikely to be a smooth journey. There will be contention, accusation, litigation and frustration. Nothing so big as setting out to administer two-dose vaccines to the whole country could be otherwise.

But the pall which hangs so heavily over us with rising deaths, exhausted first responders and overstretched hospitals, will begin to lift very slightly.

For the rest of foreseeable history, there will be accusations leveled at the Trump administration for its handling of the pandemic — or its failure to handle it.

But one thing is certain: Our faith in our ability to make superhuman scientific efforts in the face of crisis will be restored. Developing a COVID-19 vaccine will be compared to putting a man on the moon.

The large pharmaceutical companies, known collectively as Big Pharma, have shown their muscle. The lesson: Throw enough research and unlimited money at a problem, accelerate the regulatory process and a solution can result.

Even globalization gets a good grade.

The first-to-market vaccine comes from American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. But the vaccine was developed at its small German subsidiary, BioNTech, by a husband-and-wife team of first-generation Turkish immigrants. (Beware of whom you exclude.)

Biopharmaceutical research often takes place this way, akin to how it happens in Silicon Valley: Small companies innovate and invent, and larger ones gobble them up and provide the all-important resources for absurdly complicated and expensive clinical trials.

These contribute mightily to the cost of new drugs. A new “compound” -— as a drug is called in the trade — can cost up to $2 billion to bring to market; and financial reserves are needed, should there be costly lawsuits.

The development of new drugs looks like an inverted pyramid. Linda Marban, a researcher and CEO of Capricor Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company based in Los Angeles, explained it to me:

“The last 20 years have shown a seismic change in how drugs and therapies are developed. Due to the speed at which science is advancing, and the difficulty of early-stage development, most of the early-stage work is done by small companies or the occasional academic. Big Pharma has moved into the role of late-stage clinical, sometimes Phase 2, but mostly Phase 3 and commercial development.”

In the upheaval occasioned by the pandemic, overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looms large as a national priority. It must be able — maybe with a greater use of artificial intelligence and data management — to assess the safety and efficiency of desperately needed drugs without the current painful and often fatal delays.

Marban said of the FDA clinical trials process:

“It is the most laborious and frustrating process which delays important scientific and medical discoveries from patients. There are many situations where patients are desperate for therapy, but we have to climb the long and ridiculous ladder of doing clinical trials due to inefficiencies at the site which include nearly endless layers of contracting, budget negotiations, IRB [Institutional Review Board] approvals and, finally, interest and attention from overworked clinical trial staff.”

This situation, according to Marban, is compounded by the FDA’s requirement for clinical trials conducted and presented in a certain way, which often precludes getting an effective therapy to market. “If we simplify this process alone, we could move rapidly towards treatments and even cures for many horrific diseases,” she added.

War is a time of upheaval, and we are at war against the COVID-19. But war also involves innovation. We have proved that speed is possible when bureaucracy is energized and streamlined.

When COVID-19 is finally vanquished, it should leave a legacy of better medical research and sped-up approval procedures, benefiting all going forward.

There is a trust deficit in this country, and it may kill a lot of us.

We haven’t been trusting for a long time, but distrust reached its zenith during and after the recent election. The election, still contested, brought with it a massive overhang of distrust. Indeed, the past four years have been marked by wide distrust.

Distrusting the election results isn’t fatal. But distrusting the experts on the need to get vaccinated for Covid-19 is. Yet there are reports that as many as 50 percent of Americans won’t get the vaccine when it is available. That is lethal and a true threat to national security, the economy, our way of life, everything.

If we don’t get our jabs, we will continue to die from coronavirus at an alarming rate. Over 258,000 Americans have perished and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects 320,000 deaths by mid-December.

As I recall, it was during the 1960s that we began wide distrusting. By the end of the Vietnam War, we distrusted on a huge scale. We distrusted what we were told by the military, what we were told by President Lyndon Johnson and then by President Richard Nixon.

We also distrusted the experts. Just about all experts on all subjects, from nuclear power safety to the environmental impact of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet.

Beyond Vietnam, distrust was fed by the unfolding evidence that we had been the victims of systemic lying. This led to big social realignments, as seen in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. These betrayals exacerbated our natural American distrust of officialdom.

The establishment and its experts had been caught lying about the war and about other things. It was a decade that detonated trust, shredded belief in expertise, and left many of us feeling that we might as well make it up as we went along.

Now the trust deficit is back.

If LBJ and Nixon fueled distrust in the 1960s and early 1970s, the current breach of trust belongs to President Donald Trump and his enablers scattered across the body politic, from presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway with her “alternative facts” to the Senate Republicans and their disinclination to check the president, even verbally.

The trust deficit has divided us. Seventy-three million did vote for Trump and many of those believe what, most dangerously, he has said about the pandemic.

The result has been the growth of diabolical myths about Covid-19. Taking seriously some, or all, of Trump’s outpourings on the coronavirus — from his advocacy of sunlight and his off-label drug recommendations, like hydroxychloroquine, to putting the pandemic out of mind as a “hoax” — fomented its spread.

We have been waiting for a medical breakthrough to repel and conquer Covid-19 and it looks as though that is at hand with the arrival of not one but three vaccines, the first of which should be available in about three weeks to the most vulnerable populations. The development of these vaccines represents a stupendous medical effort: the Manhattan Project of medicine.

But it will all be in vain if Americans don’t trust the authorities and don’t get vaccinated. It looks as though, according to surveys, 50 percent of the population will get vaccinated. The rest will choose to believe in medical fictions like herd immunity — a pernicious idea that eventually we will all be immune by living with Covid-19. It should be noted that this didn’t happen with other infectious diseases like bubonic plague, smallpox, polio, even the flu.

My informal survey of research doctors puts the odds on who will get vaccinated a little better than 50 percent. They conclude that one third will get vaccinated, one third will wait to see the results among those who got vaccinated early, and one third won’t get vaccinated, believing that the disease has been hyped and that it isn’t as serious as the often-castigated media says. Some of the “Covid-19 deniers” will be the permanent anti-vaxxers, people who think that vaccines have bad side effects; they believe, for example, that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

This medical heresy even as hospitals are filling to capacity, their staff are exhausted, and bodies are piling up in refrigerated trailers because there is nowhere to put them.

Without near universal vaccination, the coronavirus will be around for years. The superhuman effort to get a vaccine will have been partially in vain. The silver bullet will be tarnished.

Get a grip, America. Get your jabs.

Simple advice to innovators and policymakers: Don’t worry about collateral needs or they will distort your good growth and policy efforts.

If we look back, the development of the automobile had collateral effects beyond the ability of the auto pioneers to conceive. Yet there were those who would have restricted automobile development because they worried about the collateral effects, including that there wouldn’t be enough gasoline, oil would run out, cars were dangerous and the fuel stations would explode.

The lesson wasn’t that those were minor concerns, but that they were giant and reasonable concerns that didn’t take into account that there would be as much creativity in solving those problems as there was in creating the primary product in the first place.

If the Wright brothers had worried about how we would keep aircraft from colliding with each other, well, we would have more trains and passenger ships.

The message is that innovation begets innovation. Invent one thing and then invest in something else to support it.

Yet there are reactionary forces at work in the creative arena all the time.

To continue with the automobile example, there are gainsayers to the electric car everywhere. Sometimes they are driven by economics, but often they are just worried about great change.

I can hardly pass a day without reading alarmist pieces about the disposal of batteries, a possible shortage of lithium from friendly suppliers or that there won’t be enough charging points.

To all that, I say piffle.

History tells us that these seeming problems will be solved by the same inventiveness that has brought us to this time when we are seeing a switch from the internal combustion engine — faithful servant though it has been — to electricity.

The danger is rigidity.

Rigidity is the seldom-diagnosed inhibitor of good science, good engineering and good policy. Rigidity in policy, or even just in belief, restricts and distorts.

A rigid belief is that nuclear waste is a huge problem.

I would submit that it is less of a problem than many other wastes we are leaving to future generations. Rigid concerns and rigidly wrong radiation standards led the electric utilities to turn to coal, and now to wind and solar to move away from coal and its successor, natural gas.

Medicine is beset by rigidities and it always has been, from excessive use of bleeding therapy to surgeons who believed it was ungentlemanly to wash their hands.

Those who suffer from less common diseases — Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is one — are impacted by medical profession rigidities. The doctors try to fit disease into what they know and treat patients with known but inappropriate therapies.

Even great innovators like Henry Ford weren’t without their crippling rigidities. Henry Ford was opposed to 6-cylinder engines and wanted all cars to be black.

Political rigidities are perhaps the most pernicious.

I would suggest that the fear of the bogeyman of socialism has prevented us from developing a sensible healthcare system; one that is less expensive and has better results. It doesn’t have to be modeled on Britain’s National Health Service, but it could borrow from Germany or Holland where the health system is universal but provided by private insurance.

Ditch the rigidity and start fixing the patient — in this case, the whole system.

Our educational system is plagued with rigidities. At the lower end, the public schools, children aren’t getting the basics they need to function in our society. At the high end, the universities, there is a new kind of aristocracy where the favored faculty are coddled, shielded and underproductive, while the cost for students is prohibitive.

Our most productive, most gifted graduates are compelled to align their careers with jobs that will pay enough to free them from the debt burden we start them in life with. This might cause a bright student to go into computer science when he or she longed to study astronomy, certainly a less well-paid future.

Rigidities kept women from seeking new roles and responsibilities, and from seeking their own personal and professional identities rather than have them defined by the outside, male-dominated society. Homemaking, yes; corporate management, no.

Rigid doctrine is always at work and is an unseen impediment to future innovation in science, social structure and, above all, in politics.

Watch for it.

It is coming to us as a diabolical enemy: malign, merciless and murderous.

The second wave of COVID-19 will be killing us today, tomorrow, and on and on until a vaccine is administered not just to the willing recipients, but to the whole population. That could take years.

We haven’t been through anything like this since the 1918 influenza pandemic. Not only is COVID-19 set to kill many more of us than it already has, but it also is likely to have huge collateral damage.

Think restaurants: 60 percent of the individually owned ones are set to fail. Think real estate: The damage is so far too great and expanding too fast to calculate — all those office buildings sitting empty, all those shopping centers being vacated. The real estate crisis is beginning, just beginning, to be felt by the banks.

Think education: A year has been lost in education.

Our cultural institutions, from small sports teams to all the performing arts, are on death watch. How long can you hold a theater production company together? How do you save those very fragile temples of high culture, including ballet, opera and symphony music? What of the buildings which house them?

Now looming are the malevolent threats to Thanksgiving and Christmas. These festivals, so cherished, so looked forward to, such milestones of every year and our lives, are set to kill many of us, gathered in love and joy.

Families will assemble in happiness, but that diabolical guest COVID-19 will be taking its monstrous, lethal place at our tables — at the very events that in normal times bind us together. Death will share our feasts.

These are words of alarm, and they are meant to be.

Nearly a quarter of a million of us have died, choked to death by the virus. Projected deaths are 110,000 more by the new year. Yet our leaders have spurned the modest defenses available to us: face masks and isolation. There is little usefulness in assigning blame — but there is blame — and it points upward.

But there is localized blame, too.

Blame for what I see on the streets, where young people stroll without protecting themselves and others from the deadly virus. Blame for what I see at the shops, where customers gain entry without the modest consideration of wearing a face mask for a few minutes.

There is blame for pastors who have insisted on holding services that have spread COVID-19 to their parishioners. And there is blame for those who have rallied or taken to street demonstrations. The virus has no political affiliation, but politics has befriended it in awful ways.

The mother lode of blame must be put upon that increasingly bizarre figure Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, elected to lead and defend us.

Trump couldn’t have vanquished the pandemic, but he could have limited its spread. He could have guided the people, set an example, told the truth, unleashed consideration not invective.

He could have done his job.

When we needed information, we got lies; when we needed guidance, we were encouraged to take risks by myth and bad example. A high number of his own staff has been felled.

On Jan. 20, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden will step into this gigantic crisis. Even if the first doses of a vaccine are being administered, the crisis will still be in full flame, taking lives, destroying businesses, subtracting jobs and changing the trajectory of the future.

There will be good, but it will take time to arrive. It will be in innovation in everything, from more medical research to start-ups and lessons learned about survival in crisis.

It will impact immigration. Only the willfully unobservant won’t note that a preponderance of the health authorities featured nightly on television weren’t born here, and their talent is a bonus for the country.

It should be noted that Pfizer’s landmark COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t developed in that U.S. pharmaceutical behemoth, but by a husband-and-wife team in a small company in Germany. Both are children of Turkish immigrants to that country.

In all countries, immigrants have had the adventurous spirit that is the soul of creativity. Let them in.

Damn, damn, damn the polls.

My irritation has nothing to do with the way they botched this election; or how they botched the last two British elections or the Brexit vote.

It is not a matter, to my mind, of whether the polls get it wrong. It is a matter simply that they are taken at all. I have been railing against them for years.

I have found pollsters on the whole — I have interviewed quite a few — to be decent, honest people who believe they are taking the voters’ temperature scientifically; that their work is helpful, contributing to the national or regional understanding.

But polls are far from the benign things they purport to be. They are a setup shot that becomes the movie; a snapshot that changes the course of events, a contrived intrusion into the public discourse that then monopolizes it.

Polls sideline good people, bring into favor the known over the unknown, and promote a kind of national continuation. They begin to write the narrative, not to reveal it. They terrify timid leaders and office aspirants.

These same arguments can be made against a lot of market research. Ask people what they like, and they will tell you they like what they know.

Imagine if Harold Ross, the genius who created The New Yorker, had polled the public about the magazine he was about to start in 1925, and had asked, “Do you want a magazine in which the articles are long, the bylines are at the end of the articles, the headlines are in squiggly type, and there is no table of contents?”

Do you think there would be The New Yorker (it still has long articles, but the bylines are at the beginning, and it has a table of contents) today?

The most blame in the plague of polls that now distorts our elections belongs with the news media.

They commission polls relentlessly and then publicize the results, as though they have been allowed to see the face of God. This synthetic news.

Polls are not the revealed truth. They are an imperfect peek into the national thought portfolio. But once they become part of that portfolio, they corrupt the momentum of events.

Worse, polls sway the politicians. They turn the Pied Piper into one of the rats, getting in line with the rest.

In his Sept. 30, 1941 review of the war to the House of Commons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose to address the subject opinion and leadership.

He said, “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature. I see that a speaker at the weekend said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.”

Quite right.

The damage is that polls have proliferated in recent years, and they perform various functions for various people. Universities and colleges have found, as in the case of the Quinnipiac University Poll, that polls are a branding asset.

The Quinnipiac poll is run by a small college in the rolling hills of Connecticut with great professionalism and objectivity, which has given it considerable standing in the world of polling. It also has enhanced the standing of the college which runs it.

My quarrel with the polls will be partly assuaged if they continue to get it wrong.

That way they will take their place in the background clutter, not the breathtaking political snapshots that undermine elections.

“Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” was the title of a 1963 book by Jimmy Breslin about the disastrous first year of the New York Mets, an expansion team. It’s attributed to the team’s manager Casey Stengel.

As I’ve watched this picaresque presidential election year unfold, I’ve had the same thought.

The game is governance; the campaign, the run-up. And nobody seems to know how to play this game. The questions that should’ve been raised and answered were neither raised nor answered.

Some unheard and unanswered questions:

—  How will you rebuild our stature abroad, restore America to global leadership and moral authority?

—  What will you do if the pandemic hangs on for years? How will you place the millions whose jobs were lost through the pandemic in work?

—  How will you fix our ailing school system with its disastrous weaknesses exposed by COVID-19?

—  The healthcare system is stretched to breaking under the pandemic with or without Obamacare. What is your plan?

—  If the climate change-induced sea level rise accelerates, how will you deal with cities that appear in danger, including New York, Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco?

—  One of the rationales for the U.S.-Mexico border wall was to reduce the influx of drugs. Now, with the advent of drones, we may have a new drug smuggling crisis. What is your plan to combat it?

—  States depend on gasoline and cigarette taxes, but electric vehicles are pushing out gasoline taxes and cigarette smoking is in steep decline. How do you see these tax streams being replaced?

—  What will you do if China invades Taiwan?

—  What will you do if China bars U.S. shipping from traversing the South China Sea?

—   The population of Africa is set to double every quarter century. Already there is almost universal unemployment, what should the United States do to help?

—   Jobs are being eaten up by AI and other technologies. While those enthralled with these job-subtracting technologies point to the history of the Industrial Revolution, this may be different. What should be done?

Just think of anything to do with the future and a gusher of questions erupts, but no answers have been heard, or few at best.

President Trump, it seems, will offer us more government as demolition derby, but wilder than in the first four years. We’ve gotten a shower of hopes, fanciful and improbable.

When it comes to the overhanging crisis of today, the pandemic, he is like King Canute commanding the waves to retreat.

From his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, we are to get what?

Decency, character? Like all candidates, he’s told us he’ll fix everything. But how remains obscured from us, and quite possibly from himself.

On the evening of April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson, the sage and lexicographer, told us that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.

That is a truth that Trump — who probably doesn’t know who Johnson was — has exploited as his own. He would undo the things we should be proud of in the world, like human rights, and get away with it because he wraps himself in the flag like Linus in his blanket.

Those who’ll vote for Biden will vote for a man who is old in years and old in ideas. If he wins, his supporters can trade fear for apprehension.

As we face the most momentous challenges the world has ever borne — international upheaval, a lingering pandemic and climate change — we’ve gone through a presidential campaign where the issues were shelved for repetitive nothingness.

We haven’t been lifted by high rhetoric nor inspired by blinding vision.

The global upheaval triggered by disease, nation realignment and technology will have to await the judgment of those who whisper into the ears of presidents, when they, the candidates, have none, as now.

NEW YORK — Alistair Cooke, the great British journalist who wrote his weekly “Letter from America” — a paean to the United States — for 58 years, reserved some of his most lavish praise for Manhattan.

When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited America and wanted to see Disney World, Cooke told him he’d never see anything as extraordinary as the Manhattan skyline.

I was reminded of this long-ago admonishment recently, when I had the opportunity to see Manhattan from the water, cruising around the island on a friend’s yacht, looking at that skyline, those fingers of buildings, thrusting toward heaven in a forest of architectural and engineering creativity that has no equal on earth. Dubai may aspire but it doesn’t compete.

Manhattan is awe on steroids.

I’ve savored and, at times, detested it for decades.

I suffered its awfulness at the bottom when many newspapers closed and I, an immigrant with no resources, found work as a busboy at the Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street — one of the food service automats which were once a feature of New York City.

They were where the hapless could sit unbothered for long hours without buying anything beyond coffee; where they could stay warm and sheltered in the winter.

I’ve also savored Manhattan in good times, staying at the Carlyle Hotel, one of the best hotels in the world, up there with the Ritz in Paris and Brown’s in London.

It was said when I lived there in the 1960s that New York was a city for the extraordinarily rich and the extremely poor. I found work in Washington and stayed south; New York became a place to visit.

If it was a hard place to be poor in 1965, the extremes of poverty and wealth only increased with time.

More great buildings, enabled by engineering that allowed them to be planted in smaller plots of land, sprouted in Manhattan. Spindle apartment buildings and sprawling waterfront office developments were built with money that flowed in from hedge funds, tech companies, Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires and Middle Eastern oil-garchs.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Big Apple felt its vulnerability to a hostile, premeditated attack. Now it is facing its greatest crisis, one that will wound it mortally if not fatally: COVID-19.

New York City has an uncertain future. People are moving out, selling their expensive co-ops at a loss, and buying in less-crowded places on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut and even farther afield.

As I looked in wonder at the city of striving people, epitomized by its buildings which themselves seem to strive to go ever higher, I wondered whether New York is over, destined to a slow death; its apartments in the clouds likely to be abandoned, and its trove of office space to sit empty as a new generation grows into the idea that working from home — home far away — is the norm, the new way to think about work.

The New York Times has looked at the problem and its writers can’t, it seems, bring themselves to answer the question: Is it over?

The city’s impending tragedy will be played out in other cities, but it is in New York that it will be most visible, most painful; the dream most shattered.

Sure, you might say, it was built on greed and now it must pay the price. But it was also built on much else: immigration, diversity, financial acumen, theater, fine art, sweat and toil  — and that most human of emotions: aspiration.

I hope the new normal will allow cities to recover and New York to swagger forward as it has in the past: difficult to live in and difficult to live without. It’s a miracle of a city, a big shiny apple.

It’s not a trial. But the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee into the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court seemed like one.

This juror’s verdict: Guilty as charged in one liberal indictment and a toss-up in the other. Judge Barrett seems destined to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But on the Affordable Care Act, which is of more immediate concern to more Americans, she may parse her judgment and endorse the doctrine of selectivity.

Two big things about Barrett: Her opposition to abortion is, one concludes, founded in her devout Catholicism and in her experience among lawyers of the right, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked.

The other thing about Barrett is that she has seven children, two adopted from Haiti. She used this before the committee as a shield, a defense, and a statement, which said by implication: “See, I’m human, empathetic, caring and maternal.”

This is important. As Barrett, who almost certainly will be confirmed, matures on the court, her family may be a moderating force, softening her otherwise rigid conservative views. As her children grow and experience the vicissitudes of life, she is likely to trade some of her harsh doctrines for a more humane ambiguity.

Take former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. Their conservatism, devotion to the right, was never in question. But when their daughter Mary came out as gay, their view of that part of the social-political landscape softened.

It has been declared throughout the struggle to confirm Barrett that somehow it is not meek to bring in her religion.

This juror avers: It is.

When the religion of a public servant affects political decisions, it has ceased to be a private matter.

We’ve come a long way from the days when President John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was cited in his election. Anti-Catholicism was then alive and well in parts of the political spectrum. Kennedy remained a committed Catholic, but he didn’t bring it into his governance of the country. That was as it should be.

Going forward, as the United States gets more diverse and when we can contemplate a time when Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and other believers will take their place in national life, it is more, not less, necessary to ensure that separation of church and state is adhered to in everything, especially the Supreme Court.

Ergo, it can be argued that Barrett should recuse herself from Roe v. Wade. How much stature she would gain if she did! But most unlikely.

If the Democrats romp home with the White House and both houses of Congress, they would be in a position to legislate at least a quick repair to the Affordable Care Act and to start the process of legalizing abortion by federal law, not constitutional interpretation. But it will continue to fuel the culture wars.

It is not certain how much the Democrats will gain in the election and, as a longtime observer of Washington, I don’t believe long term a Democratic sweep would be good. A bit of tension in Congress is a net benefit. So, the Barrett nomination and confirmation weighed heavy as we watched her parry the Democratic questioners.

Extenuating fact: The judge is much smarter, more personable, and more in charge of her facts than expected.

She charmed. She is a power to be reckoned with. Many observers expected to get a candidate who would simply channel Scalia, her old mentor, and that we could know her mind from his writing — the way we can predict the attitudes of Justice Clarence Thomas.

That, it became clear, is not to be the case.

The verdict of this juror then is: After a rocky start on two difficult issues, Barrett will grow to be a serious, thoughtful justice.

Possibly, with time, even a humane one.