Joe Biden becomes president with a plea that ‘politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire’
Biden takes the helm of a country reeling from historic health and economic crises, sharp divisions over race, and, in many corners, coursing with anger and misinformation.
WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr. took the oath of office to become the 46th president of the United States Wednesday with a call for unity and healing to lead the country out of a chaotic period of ferocious strife, a devastating pandemic, and personal suffering.
“This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And 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,” Biden said in a ceremony at a cold and blustery U.S. Capitol.
“We will get through this together,” he later said. “Together.”
Biden, 78, reached the pinnacle of American government more than 50 years after winning his first election to the New Castle County Council in Delaware, at the age of 27. As he arrived for the ceremony, he exchanged a vigorous fist bump with former President Barack Obama, whom he had served as vice president. He swore his oath on a thick family Bible dating to the 1800s that he has used for decades.
Minutes earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris swore her oath and became the first woman to hold that high office, as well as the first Black person and Asian American. She used two Bibles, one from a family friend and one once owned by former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She wore purple, meant to embody togetherness of America’s red and blue political factions.
Biden takes the helm of a country reeling from historic health and economic crises, sharp divisions over race, and, in many corners, coursing with anger and misinformation fueled by former President Donald Trump.
The jarring signs of the challenges facing the new administration were all around.
Biden spoke at a building where one of the darkest moments in recent U.S. history unfolded exactly two weeks earlier, when Trump supporters violently stormed the building attempting to stop the certification of Biden’s lawful election victory.
“Democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile,” Biden said in his roughly 20-minute address. “At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”
The Capitol lawn and the National Mall, usually packed with pageantry for inaugurations, were almost entirely empty. The coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 400,000 people in the U.S. and in recent days reached its deadliest stretch, already meant crowds would be kept away and the usual parade and galas impossible. The response to the Capitol insurrection added a militarized backdrop to a day usually meant to embody the foundations of a peaceful democracy.
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Biden arrived to an edgy capital city marked by locked-down streets, fences topped with razor wire, and a heavy presence of uniformed National Guard troops carrying rifles built for combat.
When Biden made the traditional trip down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, it was in near silence. His footsteps were audible on television.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, said he was “sad” as he arrived at his inauguration seat.
“It’s a military camp,” he said, his voice breaking as he walked away.
More than 10 million Americans remain out of work. Many more have seen their lives put on hold, joys sapped, and futures thrown into doubt. A coronavirus vaccine offers a measure of hope, but also a titanic logistical challenge.
Biden, with a straightforward delivery that eschewed the soaring rhetoric often deployed by new presidents, described a “winter of peril” and, repeatedly, one solution.
“To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity, unity,” he said.
“Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path,” he said later. “Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.”
National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman delivered a rousing recital of her work “The Hill We Climb,” including the lines, “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. ... But while democracy can be periodically delayed, / It can never be permanently defeated.”
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, said the day “lifted my heart.”
“It meant a great deal, I think, to so many Americans to see the ceremony conducted on the platform where just a few weeks ago, marauders and terrorists had been attempting to stop democracy,” she said.
» READ MORE: It was a ‘surreal’ inauguration for Pennsylvania lawmakers at the site of the Capitol insurrection
Biden never directly mentioned Trump who, breaking yet another tradition, declined to attend and instead flew Wednesday morning to his Florida resort. But at several points, the new president took aim at the culture of lies Trump fostered, including by falsely and relentlessly claiming the election was stolen.
“We must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured,” Biden said. He also called for confronting climate change, rising white supremacy and political extremism.
Aside from Trump, the country’s most prominent Republicans all attended, including former President George W. Bush, outgoing Vice President Mike Pence, and former House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“Our institutions were tested this year and our institutions passed the test,” Ryan said.
Biden, who spent his early years in Scranton before his family moved to Delaware, and who has long emphasized his blue-collar upbringing and ties to Pennsylvania, fell back on his roots to empathize with struggling Americans.
“I understand, like my dad, they lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering, ‘Can I keep my health care? Can I pay my mortgage?’ ” he said.
While Trump used such worries to sow anger, Biden called for “tolerance and humility.”
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“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue ... rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal,” Biden said. “We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.”
After a year in which racism was pushed to the center of the national debate, and a presidency that openly stoked racial divisions, Biden’s inauguration embraced the country’s diversity.
Harris was administered her oath by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the fist Latina on the court. Singer Jennifer Lopez injected a burst of Spanish into her rendition of “America the Beautiful.”
U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, a South Jersey Democrat, reveled in being ”a son of immigrants married to an immigrant that now has a chance to be a part of this historic day.”
In the crowd were the father of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot by police in Wisconsin, and an aunt of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot and killed by police in Louisville, Ky.
“I feel like change is coming,” Taylor’s aunt Bianca Austin said in a brief interview.
It will take time for Biden enact major legislation, or to measure the effects of his executive actions. But even before he took office, the new president aimed to offer a steady and reassuring tenor to contrast the frequently conflict-fueled Trump.
Biden and now-first lady Jill Biden spent part of Monday at a Philadelphia food bank. On Tuesday, they visited the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool for an event honoring Americans who have died of the coronavirus.
He opened his term with a flurry of actions and proposals, some symbolic, some substantive, to signal rapid changes on the pandemic, immigration, racial inequality, and climate change.
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His first big legislative effort will be a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, including $1,400 checks for most Americans, an extension of unemployment aid, and funding to help distribute the vaccine. He has promised that his administration will help administer 100 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days, and reopen schools. He also planned to send Congress a proposed immigration overhaul that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Using more than a dozen executive actions that don’t require Congress, he quickly rolled back some of Trump’s policies, including rejoining the Paris accord on climate change, ending travel restrictions targeting several largely Muslim countries, stopping construction on Trump’s wall on the Mexican border, and rescinding approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. He mandated face masks on federal property and for interstate travel.
Yet Biden will face many obstacles.
Democrats have only the most tenuous control of the House and Senate, so legislation will have to navigate his party’s moderate and progressive wings — and that’s before trying to win Republican votes. Republicans have already signaled opposition to his coronavirus relief plan, arguing that the price tag is too high, and the GOP will surely aim to block many of his other policy initiatives as too liberal.
The early days of Biden’s administration could be consumed with a Senate impeachment trial of Trump.
Trump, before boarding his flight to Florida from Joint Base Andrews, gave a speech in which he wished “the new administration great luck and great success,” without naming Biden.
“Have a good life. We will see you soon,” he concluded.
Speaking later in the Oval Office, Biden said Trump wrote him “a very generous” letter, but declined to share details.
Biden pledged during his address to be a president for “all Americans,” many Republican voters don’t accept him as the legitimate winner. It was Trump who spoke to their personal frustrations and worries.
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“President Biden’s call for ‘unity’ isn’t about bringing a divided country together. It’s about coercing ‘unity’ of thought,” tweeted Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R., Pa.), who joined the push to overturn Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Biden takes office as the oldest president ever to begin his first term, adding another chapter to an enduring career marked by ambition, achievement, and personal tragedy.
Born Nov. 20, 1942, Biden came onto the national stage in 1973, sworn into the Senate just weeks after his first wife, Neilia, and daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. He spent 36 years in the Senate before eight as vice president.
When Biden passed on running for president in 2016, while still mourning his son Beau’s death from cancer at the age of 46, it appeared his time in public life had ended.
He returned to campaigning in 2019, however, after seeing Trump as a threat to America’s core values.
He now leads a country shaken.