But you knew it wouldn't last. You could almost feel the jolt of opiate relief that went surging through their veins on Sunday, when Donald Trump strutted his stuff at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Suddenly there they all were, happily tripping again on that seemingly limitless supply of indignation and moral censure the former president generously supplies them. Mr. Trump is a little intoxicating for all of us, in both senses of the term. The CPAC performance was a reminder we didn't need of the uniquely compelling and uniquely pernicious roles he plays not only in Republican politics but in the wider American discourse. This rehab is going to be delayed a while. The primary problem with having Mr. Trump back is that it allows the media to focus again on the many deceptions of the 45th president while conveniently ignoring the large, central deception that is intended to define the administration of the 46th. The Biden team is concocting a fiction, elaborately developed and assiduously repeated. It is designed to cement the new president's legacy, ensure the political success of his party and ineradicably defame their opponents. It is that before Jan. 20, the Covid-19 pandemic was out of control, threatening an even larger catastrophe than the one that had already claimed more than 400,000 lives and destroyed so much productive economic capacity. It had been allowed to do so, the narrative asserts, by Mr. Biden's callously indifferent predecessor, who ignored the virus, disparaged science and did nothing to protect Americans. Only the heroic efforts of the Biden team, with deference to science and carefully targeted economic relief, averted catastrophe. It is a preposterous fabrication. Covid cases peaked in the U.S. at the end of the first week of January and by the time Mr. Biden took office had already fallen by a third. The claim that the administration inherited no vaccine program at all, initially propagated through the ministrations of a kindly reporter, is so at odds with the evidence that even the most friendly newspapers were obliged to call it out. So developed was the vaccination program already in place when Mr. Biden took office that it was close to achieving his supposedly ambitious goal of a million shots a day. Credit the pharmaceutical companies (institutions Democrats love to despise) and the incentives provided by a capitalist market (a system Democrats love to despise).