During the few times that Joe Biden has emerged from his basement during the general election campaign, he’s primarily stuck to one theme. President Trump hasn’t done a good enough job in battling the pandemic and all of the lives lost or ruined are somehow his fault. Most of the mainstream media has happily abetted Biden in keeping this narrative going. CNN spends most of the day displaying their programming in a smaller box to the left side of the screen while a column on the right grimly reminds everyone of the total number of COVID-19 cases and deaths both globally and in the United States. Any time a GOP event takes place where the number of people wearing masks is deemed insufficient, they rail about it for hours. (Complaints about similar careless behavior at BLM marches or riots never seem to be newsworthy.)

But if the President has fumbled the response to the pandemic so badly, what would Joe Biden have done differently? Even more to the point, if the nation decides to elect him as the next president, what brilliant plan does Biden have in store that will slay the novel coronavirus monster and bring us back to some sense of normality? We don’t know because Joe Biden isn’t saying. As Karol Markowicz points out in an op-ed at the New York Post this week, the reason that Biden is at best silent, or at worst confused, is that he doesn’t have a plan. And if he’s elected, you’re going to see a very different response to this situation on your cable news stations.

During his town hall last week, Joe Biden made a startling admission: “You can’t mandate a mask.” This was puzzling, because he had spent August badgering President Trump to implement a national mask mandate.

The confusion is of a piece with the ex-veep’s wider struggle to explain what, exactly, he would have done differently in response to the pandemic were he the one in power…

As it is, the Biden-Harris campaign offers nothing but unscientific blame. In August, Kamala Harris commented, “There’s a reason [the virus] has hit America worse than any other advanced nation. It’s because of Trump’s failure to take it seriously.”

In fact, America’s death rates are in line with many other Western countries, including Spain, Britain, Italy and Sweden. Our implementation of lockdowns and mask compliance are also comparable to many developed states.

If Joe Biden has a plan that’s materially different from what Donald Trump has been doing, he owes it to the voting public to tell us. Does he or doesn’t he support a national mask mandate? He’s implied both over the past few weeks. Would he push for continued or renewed lockdowns, further gutting the economy in a nation already long past the point of being weary of these restrictions? Should all of the schools be reopened or does he believe that’s an unacceptable risk to both students and teachers? We have no idea because Joe Biden won’t say.

It’s a blatant lie to pretend that a workable vaccine will somehow magically become available sooner just because Biden is in the White House. And the virus isn’t going to simply go away just because it’s frightened of Big Bad Joe and his California Senator sidekick. Biden claims, along with a majority of the cable news talking heads, that Trump hasn’t “spent enough money” fighting the virus, but that’s nonsense. Most of the relief money has been going to ease people’s suffering as a result of the pandemic, not on efforts to find a cure or a vaccine. And not to put too fine of a point on this, but it’s the Democrats who have blocked another round of pandemic relief funding while Trump has been begging for another stimulus bill to sign.

I’ll put on my prognosticator’s hat here for a moment and predict that there is one significant change on the way if Donald Trump doesn’t win another term. If Joe Biden wins the election, you’re going to see a shocking decrease in news stories about how bad the pandemic is. Reminders of how many people are dying will quickly fade from cable news coverage and the nation’s larger newspapers. If and when a viable vaccine does arrive, Biden will somehow be credited with riding to the rescue even though the work that went into creating it happened almost entirely under Trump’s watch. And assuming we manage to get the virus under control to the point where it’s not much worse than the seasonal flu, you won’t be hearing a word about it as long as the person in charge has a D after their name.