By some measures, it doesn’t seem like Donald Trump was really ever the president. He just didn’t do a lot of work. Most of our interactions with him were virtual. He was seemingly on vacation half the time, or at least wasting time at one of his hotels or resorts. The daily press conferences disappeared. He stopped talking to anyone except right-wing media outlets, for the most part, and eventually the cable news simply stopped covering him when he spoke because he was just spreading lies. He had so few legislative accomplishments that signing ceremonies were rare. He didn’t know how to console the nation during tragedies, so he mostly didn’t try. His foreign adventures were universally bizarre and humiliating, but also fewer in number than is ordinary.

That’s why this doesn’t really seem like much of a change:

It is as if the vast machinery of diplomacy, business and lobbying has suddenly been recalibrated for the Biden era. Mr. Trump, by far the dominant world figure for the past four years, is increasingly treated as irrelevant.

Trump may not be recognizing his own defeat, but the rest of the world is meeting with Joe Biden and preparing to deal with him as a dominant global leader.

Mr. Biden is seizing the moment, not to aggressively confront the president he defeated, but to act presidential in his stead. Even as he demands that an orderly transfer of power be allowed to begin, the president-elect is proceeding as if the political drama created by Mr. Trump amounts to little more than noise — or what his new chief of staff called the “hysterics” of a lame-duck president.

There is going to be a nasty hangover from the Trump Era, of that I have no doubt. At the same time, I’m hoping that with the passage of a little time, the last four years will almost seem like a bad dream, like something we’re not even sure really happened.

That’s the best-case scenario. We’ll look back and think, could that really have happened? Did we really live through that?

If we ever get to that place, I think I’ll be happy again for the first time in a very long time.