Donald Trump is gone. Forget him. But that wasn’t the plan. In a final dramatic gesture he left town the morning of the day Joe Biden was to be inaugurated president at noon. He claimed that he, not Sleepy Joe, had won the election in a landslide, and everyone knew it, even Joe knew it. Sure, there was no evidence for this – his campaign had claimed there was real evidence of fraud and whatnot, in sixty lawsuits filed in six states, each of which was dismissed as nonsense – but Trump said this was so, and so did Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the rest on talk radio. But nothing came of it. Trump told his people to storm the Capitol and stop the official count of the certified Electoral College vote of all the states, which they did. They tore up the place. Five died. Congress then confirmed the vote count – Biden had quite clearly won – and then the House of Representatives impeached Trump a second time. Presidents aren’t supposed to lead a mob to stop the government from governing – but Trump would show them all. He’d boycott Biden’s inauguration, and the nation would cheer. Everyone was on his side.
That was a miscalculation. No one cheered. Few even bothered to call him a sore loser. What was the point? He just didn’t matter anymore, and his presidency ended with what the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman describes here:
President Donald J. Trump left Washington aboard Air Force One for a final time on Wednesday, the iconic plane creeping along the runway so the liftoff was timed to the closing strains of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
In many ways, Mr. Trump’s last hours as president were a bookend to the kickoff of his presidential campaign in June 2015. As he did then, he tossed aside prepared remarks that aides had helped draft and spoke off the cuff, having them take down teleprompters they had set up. As he did then, he spent hours focused on the visual aspects of the scene where he would speak at the end of a calamitous final three months that capped a tumultuous term.
Before departing for Florida, Mr. Trump – defeated at the polls, twice impeached, silenced by social media platforms and facing an array of legal and financial problems – laid down a marker about his future, telling the roughly 300 supporters who greeted him on the windy tarmac, several holding American flags, that they had not seen the last of him.
“Goodbye. We love you. We will be back in some form,” Mr. Trump vowed, with the first lady, Melania Trump, by his side in sunglasses and a black outfit.
And no one cared:
A large space was built for an audience that the White House had invited to see the president off. But for a man obsessed with crowd size, only about 300 people showed up, filling roughly a third of the standing area.
For several days, aides had tried to corral officials to come to the departure, and to bring guests. But several who remained working until the president’s final day in office said they were worn out and deeply angry over his behavior since Election Day, as he spread falsehoods about the race being stolen from him, overshadowing whatever substantive achievements they might remember. Some of his aides who had been with him the longest said they did not even watch the send-off on television.
And that was that. He had become a minor footnote to history being made:
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was sworn in Wednesday as the 46th president of the United States, pledging to confront an array of convulsing challenges and bring healing and unity to a deeply fractured nation.
“This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge,” Biden said in an inaugural address that called on America to end its “uncivil war” and embrace a united front amid a series of daunting crises. “Unity is the path forward. And we must meet this moment as the United States of America. If we do that, I guarantee you we will not fail.”
With his hand on his thick family Bible and with his wife, Jill Biden, by his side, Biden recited the oath administered by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. The moment marked the pinnacle of a career in public leadership that began a half-century ago.
Moments before, Kamala D. Harris took her oath of office, making her the country’s first female vice president, and also the first Black American and first person with Asian heritage to hold the nation’s second-highest office. She had placed her hand on twin Bibles, one from a family friend and the second belonging to Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice of the Supreme Court.
The nation had moved on, with another real change:
Democrats claimed control of the Senate by the thinnest possible margin Wednesday as Vice President Harris swore in three new Democratic senators, bringing Republicans and Democrats to an even 50-50 split in the chamber.
Harris, appearing in her role as Senate president just hours after her inauguration as vice president, will serve as the tiebreaker, giving her party a one-vote majority – and thus the power to set the agenda in Senate committees and on the Senate floor.
The changing of the guard took second billing Wednesday to Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House. But with Democrats already in control of the House, the transition in the Senate holds enormous implications for Biden’s ability to staff executive agencies and pass legislation at the dawn of his presidency.
This will no longer be the place where legislation goes to die:
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the incoming majority leader, has laid out ambitious goals for the opening weeks of the new Senate, balancing the need to confirm Biden’s most important nominees with the new president’s desire to pass another pandemic relief bill, at a cost of nearly $2 trillion. Meanwhile, Schumer expects to conduct an impeachment trial for former president Donald Trump, who stands accused of fomenting a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago.
Rising for the first time as majority leader, Schumer pledged to “do business differently” and to take action to combat racial injustice, economic inequality and climate change.
“This Senate will legislate,” Schumer said, a dig at Republicans who focused on confirming Trump’s nominees. “It will be active, responsive, energetic and bold.”
Everything had changed, and Mark Leibovich describes that:
Under a crystalline Inauguration Day sky and a bunting-draped Capitol, the Marine Band welcomed the 46th president into office with a procession of fanfares – in the same spot that a mob answering the call of the 45th had ransacked the building two weeks earlier to try to stop this transfer of power.
There was no mention of Donald J. Trump, the departed and deplatformed commander in chief who flew out of town early in the morning as the first president in 152 years to refuse to attend the swearing-in of his successor.
Whether or not related to the former president’s absence, a bipartisan lightness seemed to prevail across the stage. Snow flurries gave way to sun and an aura distinctly serene. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and now former Vice President Mike Pence – both close allies of Mr. Trump who broke bitterly with him in his final days – were seen cracking grins, even chuckling with their counterparts in the opposing party.
Supreme Court justices greeted former presidents with elbow bumps and waved to masked members of Congress from several feet away, a literal separation of powers mandated by the pandemic. The rampage on Jan. 6 had brought on uniformed troops clustered in all directions across a Capitol complex otherwise abandoned by civilians. Still, the inauguration felt like a friendly gathering, a small step toward President Biden’s elusive promise of national unity.
This was the new world, or the old world restored, or the new old world. Biden had that covered:
“This is a great nation. We are good people,” Mr. Biden said, speaking in simple goals, sounding almost plaintive at times in his 21-minute address. “We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors.” He called upon a nation of citizens to renew its vows of dignity, respect and common purpose.
“We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Biden’s words did not so much ring triumphant as they conjured a sense of respite. The center had held and the system had survived, at least this time. “On this hallowed ground where just a few days ago violence sought to shake the capital’s very foundation,” the new president said, “we come together as one nation under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.”
Shorter version: “Phew.”
Leibovich is right about that, but notes that this won’t last:
There was another impeachment only a week ago. A second Senate impeachment trial could begin as soon as next week, and will almost certainly ensure that the rancor of the Trump years will spill into the new administration.
Washington has never endured a stretch like this. “There is really no historical forerunner,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. The city has seen tense moments before, particularly in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “But we’ve never had a situation where you have an inauguration two weeks after a terrorist attack – and in the same location,” he added. “It has simply never happened before.”
Even after Wednesday, it is hard to imagine that the division and suspicion of the past four years will subside. Mr. Trump might be departing the city, but he leaves behind a defiant and determined army of followers, many of them in Congress. Large majorities of Republicans across the country remain overwhelmingly supportive of the departing president. They continue to embrace his false claims that the election was “stolen,” a drumbeat that softened only slightly after Jan. 6.
If Jan. 6 was Mr. Trump’s culminating disruption, Jan. 20 was Mr. Biden’s attempt to restore regular order. Everything about the new president’s demeanor and words reflected a desire to get on with things, to end the “American carnage” that his predecessor spoke of at his own inauguration four years ago.
But that will be tricky. Michael Shear covers Biden’s first steps:
President Biden unleashed a full-scale assault on his predecessor’s legacy on Wednesday, acting hours after taking the oath of office to sweep aside President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, reverse his environmental agenda, tear down his anti-immigration policies, bolster the sluggish economic recovery and restore federal efforts aimed at promoting diversity.
Moving with an urgency not seen from any other modern president, Mr. Biden signed 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations from the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon. Among the steps the president took were orders to rejoin the Paris climate accord and end Mr. Trump’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim and African countries.
It was time to fix it all:
Individually, the actions are targeted at what the president views as specific, egregious abuses by Mr. Trump during four tumultuous years. Collectively, Mr. Biden’s assertive use of executive authority was intended to be a hefty and visible down payment on one of his primary goals: to, as his top advisers described it, “reverse the gravest damages” done to the country by Mr. Trump.
That’s good, and that’s asking for trouble:
“We’ll press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and significant possibilities,” Mr. Biden said during his Inaugural Address at the Capitol, delivered to a crowd shrunken by coronavirus risks and threats of violence. “Much to repair. Much to restore. Much to heal. Much to build, and much to gain.”
In his remarks, Mr. Biden stressed unity of purpose, urging Americans to “see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors” and pleaded with citizens and leaders to “join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature.”
But his first actions in office were aimed not at compromise and cooperation with his adversaries, but instead suggested a determination to quickly erase much of the Trump agenda.
That means this:
Mr. Biden signed an executive order that Mr. Trump had steadfastly refused to issue during his tenure – imposing a national mandate requiring masks and physical distancing in all federal buildings, on all federal lands and by all federal employees. And he terminated Mr. Trump’s efforts to leave the World Health Organization, sending Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, to participate in the group’s annual executive board meeting on Thursday.
That also means this:
Many of Mr. Biden’s actions on Wednesday were aimed at reversing Mr. Trump’s harshest immigration policies, moving swiftly to send a message to the world that the United States’ borders are no longer slammed shut.
He signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration’s plan to exclude noncitizens from the census count and a second order aimed at bolstering the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects “Dreamers” from deportation. Mr. Trump had sought for years to end the program, known as DACA.
Mr. Biden repealed two Trump-era proclamations that established a ban on travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim and African countries, ending one of his predecessor’s earliest actions to limit immigration. The president also directed the State Department to develop ways to address the harm caused to those prevented from coming to the United States because of the ban.
And in a strike at Mr. Trump’s most cherished ambition, the construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico – which was devised to keep immigrants out of the country – Mr. Biden halted construction as his administration examines the legality of the wall’s funding and contracts.
But wait, there’s more:
Mr. Biden, who takes office after a year of racial upheaval in the country, moved quickly to begin unwinding some of Mr. Trump’s policies that he views as contributing to the polarization and division.
In a nod to the diverse coalition that helped him get elected, the president signed a broad executive order aimed at requiring all federal agencies to make equity a central factor in their work. The order requires that they deliver a report within 200 days to address how to remove barriers to opportunities in policies and programs.
Mr. Biden directed federal agencies to conduct reviews looking to eliminate systemic discrimination in their policies and to reverse historic discrimination in safety net and other federal spending.
And there’s this too:
Another executive order required that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses action by Mr. Trump’s administration. Another overturned a Trump executive order that had limited the ability of federal government agencies to use diversity and inclusion training.
And Mr. Biden canceled Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission, which released a report on Monday that historians said distorted the history of slavery in the United States.
The Trump administration issued that report, arguing that slavery wasn’t all that bad and that liberals hate America, on Martin Luther King Day. It was a poke in the eye. They knew the Biden administration would deep-six this nonsense. This was just a bit of trolling done for their base, to own the liberals, whose heads would explode. Biden shrugged and canceled that project. And then he trolled the hard right:
Many of Mr. Trump’s most significant actions as president were aimed at limiting regulation of the environment and pulling back from efforts to combat climate change. Mr. Biden’s earliest actions as president took aim at those policies.
On Wednesday, he signed a letter reversing Mr. Trump’s departure from the Paris Climate Accords. He then signed an executive order beginning the process of overturning environmental policies under the Trump administration, including rescinding rollbacks to vehicle emissions standards; imposing a moratorium on oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline; and re-establishing a working group on the social costs of greenhouse gasses.
Trump wanted America to go back to running on coal. Forget that and work on real problems:
As he promised during the campaign, Mr. Biden took several steps on Wednesday to help Americans struggling through continued financial hardship brought on by the pandemic, in some cases reversing policies embraced by his predecessor.
He extended a federal moratorium on evictions and asked agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, to prolong a moratorium on foreclosures on federally guaranteed mortgages. The extensions all run through the end of March.
Another order targets Americans with heavy educational debt, continuing a pause on federal student loan interest and principal payments through the end of September.
Republicans will howl. David Sanger sees this:
President Biden’s plea for national unity in his Inaugural Address on Wednesday was rooted in a belief – born of decades working inside the fractious institutions of government – that America can return to an era where “enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward.”
It was a call for the restoration of the ordinary discord of democracy, with a reminder that “politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path.” The words were made all the more potent because they were delivered from the same steps at the entrance to the Capitol where a violent attack two weeks ago shocked the nation into realizing the lengths to which some Americans would go to overturn the results of a democratic election.
In fact, that had changed everything. The old was new again, and the old was good, but still, it was old:
Mr. Biden’s inauguration was notable for its normalcy, and the sense of relief that permeated the capital as an era of constant turmoil and falsehood ended. Yet he takes office amid so many interlocking national traumas that it is still unclear whether he can persuade enough of the nation to walk together into a new era. To do so, he needs to lead the country past the partisan divisions that made mask-wearing a political act, and to win acceptance from tens of millions of Americans who believed a lie that the presidency had been stolen.
That may be possible:
Lincoln, whose inauguration amid fear of violence hung over this moment, faced a country fracturing into civil war. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was in his third term when Mr. Biden was born, faced a nation mired in depression, with “Hoovervilles” in the shadow of the Capitol.
While Mr. Biden does not face a single crisis of equal magnitude, he made clear – without quite making the comparison – that none of his predecessors confronted such a fearsome array of simultaneous trials.
He listed them: a devastating pandemic that in one year has killed more Americans than the nation lost during World War II (he could have added Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), an economic downturn that brought with it “joblessness and hopelessness,” a crisis of racial justice and another of climate, and, for tens of millions of Americans, a collapse in their faith in democracy itself.
And finally, he argued, American healing would require an end to partisan self-delusion, and to the era of alternative facts.
That would require that everyone just grow up:
He never referred to President Donald J. Trump, but he was clearly talking about him – and the more than 140 Republicans in Congress who voted not to certify the election results, despite an absence of any evidence of widespread fraud – when he said that “we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”
That’s a good idea, and perhaps a useless idea:
Mr. Biden’s presidency is predicated on a bet that it is not too late to “end this uncivil war.” Even some of his most ardent supporters and appointees, a generation or more younger than he is, wonder whether his calls for Americans to listen to one another, “not as adversaries but as neighbors,” are coming too late.
“Like Lincoln, Biden comes to power at a moment when the country is torn between conflicting visions of reality and identity,” said Jon Meacham, the presidential historian who occasionally advises Mr. Biden and contributed to his Inaugural Address.
“Too many Americans have been shaped by the lie that the 2020 election was somehow stolen,” he said. “The new president’s challenge – and opportunity – is to insist that facts and truth must guide us. That you can disagree with your opponent without delegitimizing that opponent’s place within the Republic.”
Is that even possible now? That’s an open question:
Mr. Biden’s speech was about restoring that world, one that existed in the America he grew up in. It is the argument of a 78-year-old who has endured tragedy after tragedy in public and who, in a reverse of the usual order, took on the manner of a statesman before he returned to the campaign trail as a politician.
But what millions of Americans hear as a heartfelt call to restore order, millions of others believe masks deep partisanship, or a naïveté about what has happened to America over the past four years, or the past 20.
In fact, beyond the call for unity, Mr. Biden’s speech was littered with phrases bound to reignite those arguments.
His references to the “sting of systemic racism,” to “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism,” and his insistence that the climate crisis ranks among the nation’s top threats, were meant to signal to the progressive side of his party, which always viewed him as too conservative and cautious, that new priorities had arrived.
Those who oppose him, however, hear him calling them names they don’t deserve. They’re not racists. They don’t speak of white supremacy. They’re just white, the good guys who built the modern world. And they have no love of domestic terrorism – but someone should beat Nancy Pelosi to death and then hang Mike Pence – but figuratively, not literally, maybe.
Donald Trump can be blamed for much of this:
The armed camp he had left behind was testimony to the divisions Mr. Trump left in his wake as he flew over the city one last time on Wednesday morning in Marine One, to the closest any American president has come to internal exile since Richard M. Nixon resigned in 1974. (Mr. Trump’s last words to his supporters at Joint Base Andrews, “Have a nice life,” seemed to underscore his own inability to find a way to process the damage done.)
It wasn’t the empty National Mall that struck attendees as much as the miles of iron fencing, topped with razor wire and surrounded by thousands of National Guard troops. There was no more vivid illustration of the state of the nation that Mr. Biden was inheriting.
This won’t be easy. He has to build a new old world. That may be impossible.
Just Above Sunset 