WASHINGTON – Joe Biden rooted his candidacy in the notion Americans want a return to normalcy, a sense of calm, the ideal that, while more work is to be done, people could disagree respectfully after four tumultuous years of President Donald Trump.
But nothing will be normal about the start of this presidency.
Biden will take his oath of office Wednesday in a heavily fortified Washington, D.C., where thousands of National Guard troops stand guard in front of a Capitol that was just assaulted by a pro-Trump mob. He’ll pledge unity as people across the nation still doubt his legitimacy. And he’ll preach calm as the Senate prepares to hold an impeachment trial to decide his predecessor’s culpability in last week’s riot.
The remarkable setting underscores the difficulty Biden faces in uniting a nation reeling from months of political upheaval marked by another presidential impeachment, nationwide racial unrest and a spiraling pandemic that’s crippled the economy and killed nearly 400,000 in the U.S.
President-elect Joe Biden calls the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol “an assault on the most sacred of American undertakings: the doing of the people’s business.”
With a Congress controlled by Democrats, Biden may face pressure to plow forward with a liberal agenda and abandon efforts at reaching across the aisle. But he shouldn’t, said Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University.
“He just is on record on so many occasions as advocating reconciliation, mutual understanding, and bipartisanship,” he said. “And if he goes right into battle mode, puts on that flak vest immediately, I think much of the sense that this is a decent human being and a good guy would be lost. And that really is his stock and trade … I just don’t think he can do it any other way.”
Americans ‘want their government to work’
Trump won in 2016 on a promise to shake up the status quo. His bellicose attacks on the Washington establishment took aim at the very normalcy he said protected elites at the expense of average Americans.
