Plenty of Americans want more than anything to return to normal, or what once seemed normal and now seems like asking for the moon: a competent, possibly even boring caretaker president (oh, to be bored again during presidential press conferences — blissfully bored) who speaks in complete sentences and doesn’t conduct delicate diplomacy with misspelled words and multiple exclamation marks on Twitter. Who can keep appointees in his government for longer than five minutes. Who doesn’t do anything weird and who doesn’t keep you up at night because even so he might yet do something weird. Who isn’t a public embarrassment. Whom you can safely ignore. Rather than rooting for socialist revolution, many Democrats and independents yearn to give CNN a rest and go back to reruns of Friends.

Bloomberg is what Trump only feigns to be: a successful self-made billionaire who built his own business from scratch. He’s also as rich as Trump acts as though he is (worth about $60 billion; Trump is merely worth three). He’s a genuine centrist, and has previously run for office as a Republican. For over a decade Bloomberg was an excellent mayor of New York, a city with the population of Switzerland. If Bloomberg’s a little dull (a relief, in my book), he doesn’t, like Joe Biden, leave you perched on the edge of your chair in terror that he’s about to say something incredibly stupid. At nearly Bernie’s age of 78, he may be, alas, even older than 73-year-old Trump. But he’s not fat.