WASHINGTON (AP) – When Joe Biden first entered the Oval Office as president a month ago, his pens were ready. Already.
Covered in a beautiful wooden box, they carried the presidential seal and an imprint of his signature, a micro-mission carried out before his oath.
Four years ago, pens were just another little drama at Donald Trump’s White House. The gold-plated signature pens he preferred had to be placed on an urgent order in the early days. Over time, he favored Sharpies over government-issued pens.
In matters much deeper than a pen, Biden aims to demonstrate that the days of an official presidency are over.
He wants to show that the inflationary cycle of indignation can be contained. That things can be done by the book. That the new guy can erase the legacy of the “ex-guy”, as Biden called Trump.
On politics, symbolism and style, from the Earth’s climate to what’s not on his desk (the Trump button to invoke a Diet Coke), Biden has purged Trumpism as he can in an early stretch that is totally different from turbulence and problems of the first month of its predecessor.
The test for Biden is whether his stylistic changes will be accompanied by policies that provide a marked improvement for Trump, and a month is not enough time to measure that. In addition, Biden’s honeymoon duration is likely to be brief in the highly polarized Washington, with Republicans already saying he has given in to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
The first time the nation saw Biden in the Oval Office, hours after his oath, he sat behind the Resolute Desk with a mask on his face.
Trump, of course, avoided the masks. Not only that, but he used a cultural war totem pole and a political baton, even when thousands of Americans died every day from a virus that properly used masks can repel.
Although Biden wore a mask in the campaign, seeing it on the face of the new president sitting at the table in the famous Oval Office brought a different message. Biden wished to break with his predecessor while his government took responsibility for the deep and intractable crises that awaited him.
The strategy had been underway since before the election and started with Biden at the table signing a flurry of executive orders. The intention was clear: to roll out the core of Trump’s agenda on immigration, pandemic and more, while bringing together international alliances and trying to assure historic allies that the United States could be trusted once again.
“The subtext under each of the images that we see in the White House is the flag: ‘Under new administration’,” said Robert Gibbs, who was press secretary to President Barack Obama.
“Whether showing it openly or subtly, the message they are trying to convey, without involving the ex-president, is to ensure that everyone understands that things would work differently now and that, hopefully, the results would also be different.”
In a blackout of executive actions in his first few weeks, Biden reversed Trump’s course on the environment and placed Obama’s health law at the center of the pandemic response with an extended special enrollment period for the insurance program that Trump vowed to kill.
The nuclear deal with Iran that Biden’s predecessor abandoned is back on the diplomatic plate. The USA is back to the World Health Organization as well as the Paris climate agreement.
But associations and diplomatic reach go only so far. The world wants to see how far Biden will actually go to meet climate targets, whether he will direct more aid to the poorest countries during the pandemic and whether his words of renewed solidarity with NATO can only last until the next swing of the US policy pendulum. .
In addition, Biden faces the reality that in the past four years China has moved to fill the gap left by the United States in trade and the allies learned to trust the United States less during the more hostile Trump era.
A month after Trump’s presidency, he had already lost his national security adviser and his choice of secretary of labor due to the scandal. The revolving door of burned, wretched, or disadvantaged advisers was already creaking in motion.
Bureaucratic forces leaked information and resisted their policies. The revelations were emerging over an FBI investigation into his campaign’s contacts with Russian intelligence officials, a precursor to a special investigation that would eventually turn into impeachment. Judges had already blocked his order to suspend the refugee program and ban visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Biden’s first month was relatively dramatized, with many of his cabinet choices approved and with no obvious upheavals among his team other than the departure of a White House press officer who made an unholy threat to a journalist.
After 40 years in Washington, eight years as Obama’s vice president and two failed presidential campaigns before his successful campaign, Biden has had a lifetime to think about the brand he wants to leave as president and how to move forward.
“No one who saw Joe Biden as a candidate should be surprised by any of this,” said senior advisor Anita Dunn. “He had no learning curve in terms of issues, but also in how to be president.”
However, there were challenges: the distraction from Trump’s post-presidential impeachment trial, a more divided Senate than his predecessor faced and a candidate to lead the Office of Management and Budget who is busy deleting years of social media posts that attack Republicans and some from the Democratic left.
Much of what Biden set out to do was to mark a change in Trump both in style and in substance.
The Democrat framed his first month as one to begin “healing the nation”, restoring the presidency and restoring the White House as a symbol of stability and credibility.
He acted to lessen Washington’s party grudge by shutting down Trump’s impeachment spectacle almost completely. which consumed the capital most of the month and did not watch it live on TV. However, his early efforts to work with Republicans on relief from COVID-19 stalled.
Pre-dawn tweets are gone that rocked Washington with ad hoc policy ads and incendiary rhetoric. The prolonged, improvised and combative conversations with the mainstream press of the “enemy of the people” were gone.
The optimistic projections about the virus are gone, with unfortunate promises that the country is “rounding the corner” of the pandemic.
In contrast to his predecessor, Biden spoke out against the public about the pandemic and the resulting economic devastation, recognizing that things would get worse before it got better.
“You had the ex-guy saying that, well, you know, we’re just going to open things up, and that’s all we need to do,” said Biden at his first town hall meeting as president last week. “We said, no, you have to deal with the disease before you get the economy going.”
A pattern emerged: the president and his team deliberately set low expectations – especially with regard to vaccines and the reopening of schools – and then tried to achieve a political victory by exceeding that schedule.
How low? On Friday in Michigan, he exposed only the possibility of the country returning to normal by the end of the year. “God willing, this Christmas will be different than the last, but I can’t make that commitment to you,” he said.
Biden’s team installed a new discipline within the walls of the West Wing. The new president had only an extended question and answer session with reporters, and his exchanges in the Oval Office or before embarking on Marine One were brief.
The White House messages accompany the evaluations Biden made in his inaugural speech: The United States is being tested and the answers will not be easy.
The daily press briefings are back, this time in sign language. Pets roam the White House lawn again. The fire crackles in the White House fireplace. Biden says he starts the day by working out, making coffee and eating yogurt or Raisin Bran.
At his Wisconsin town hall event, Biden spoke several times about how he didn’t want to talk about the ex-guy.
“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump, I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” he said. “For four years, all that has been in the news is Trump. In the next four years, I want to make sure that all the news is from the American people. “
This is a difficult task. The ex-president maintains his hold on millions of supporters and his blocking in much of the Republican Party, whether he ends up running again or not.
But as far as Biden can, he is doing what Obama predicted during the 2020 campaign if the Democrat wins. Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris would make it possible to ignore the Washington circus again, Obama said at a rally, and would give Americans some predictability, whether they liked Biden’s course or not.
“You won’t have to think about them every day,” said Obama. “It just won’t be so exhausting. You will be able to live your lives. “