WASHINGTON (AP) – When Joe Biden first entered the oval office as president a month ago, his feathers were ready. Now.
Lining a thin wooden box, they carried the presidential stamp and a stamp of his signature, a micro-mission carried out before his oath.
Four years ago, Feathers was one more little drama at Donald Trump’s White House. The gold-plated signature feathers he favored had to be put in order in a hurry on his opening days. Over time, he came to favor Sharpies over the feathers issued by the government.
In matters much deeper than a pen, Biden has shown that the days of a trouser chair presidency are over.
He wants to show that the inflationary cycle of outrage can be contained. That things can be done with the book. That the new boy can erase the legacy of the ex-boy, as Biden has called Trump.
In terms of politics, symbolism, and style, from Earth’s climate to what’s not on the desk (Trump’s button to convene a Diet Coke), Biden has been purging Trumpism, although it can, in an initial stretch that is totally different from agitation and problems of the first month of its predecessor.
Biden’s test is whether his stylistic changes will fit policies that bring a noticeable improvement to Trump, and a month is not enough to measure it. Also, the duration of Biden’s honeymoon is likely to be short in Washington, highly polarized, and Republicans already say it has fallen on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
The first time the nation saw Biden in the oval office, hours after being invested, he sat behind the Resolute Desk with a mask on his face.
Trump, of course, had run away from masks. Not only that, but he had used a cultural war totem and a political scrub, even when thousands of Americans died every day from a virus that can prevent properly worn masks.
Although Biden wore a mask to the campaign, seeing it on the face of the new president on the counter in the famous oval office gave rise to a different message. Biden wanted to make a strong break with his predecessor while his administration came to possess the deep and intractable crises that awaited him.
The strategy had been underway since before the election and began with Biden at the counter signing a wave of executive orders. The intent was clear: to unravel the heart of Trump’s agenda on immigration, pandemic, and more, while meeting in international alliances and trying to assure historic allies that the United States can be trusted again.
“The subtext of each of the images we see from the White House is the flag:‘ Under new management, ’” says Robert Gibbs, who was President Barack Obama’s press secretary.
“Whether it’s showing it openly or subtly, the message they’re trying to convey, without involving the former president, is to make sure everyone understands that things would work differently now and that we expect the results to be different as well.”
In a shutdown of executive actions in his early weeks, Biden reversed Trump’s course on the environment and placed Obama’s health care law at the center of the pandemic response with a special enrollment period by the insurance program that Trump vowed to kill.
The nuclear deal on Iran that Biden’s abandoned predecessor is back on the diplomatic plane. The US is once again part of the World Health Organization as well as the Paris climate agreement.
But the members and the diplomatic diffusion only go so far. The world wants to see how far Biden will reach its climate goals, whether it will direct more aid to the poorest countries in a pandemic, and whether its words of renewed solidarity with NATO can only last until the next pendulum of northern politics. American.
In addition, Biden faces the reality that over the past four years, China has moved to fill the trade gap left by the United States and allies have learned to trust the United States less during the ‘was Trump more hostile.
A month after Trump’s presidency, he had already lost the scandal of his national security adviser and his election as labor secretary. The revolving door of burned, dishonored, or disadvantaged helpers was already creaking.
The forces of the bureaucracy filtered information and resisted its policies. Revelations emerged about an FBI investigation into his campaign contacts with Russian intelligence officers, a precursor to a special investigation that would eventually turn into dismissal. Judges had already blocked his order to suspend the refugee program and ban visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Biden’s first month has been relatively drama-free, with many of his Cabinet selections approved and there are no obvious convulsions among his staff other than the departure of a White House press officer. which posed a profane threat to a journalist.
After 40 years in Washington, eight years as Obama’s vice president and two failed presidential campaigns before his success, Biden has had a lifetime to think about the brand he wants to leave as president and how to achieve it.
“No one looking at Joe Biden as a candidate should be surprised by any of this,” said senior adviser Anita Dunn. “I had no learning curve on the issues, but also on how to be president.”
However, there have been challenges: the distraction of Trump’s post-presidential trial, a Senate more closely divided than his predecessor faced, and a candidate to head the Office of Management and Budgets who has been busy deleting years of posts on social media assaulting Republicans and some of the Democratic left.
Much of what Biden has set out to do has been to mark a change from Trump in both his style and background.
The Democrat framed his first month as starting to “heal the soul” of the nation, repairing the presidency and restoring the White House as a symbol of stability and credibility.
He has acted to reduce Washington’s partisan resentment, detaching himself almost entirely from the spectacle of Trump’s removal. who consumed the capital for much of the month and did not watch it live on television. However, his first efforts to work with Republicans in the relief of COVID-19 have stalled.
Gone are the pre-day tweets that rocked Washington with impromptu policy announcements and incendiary rhetoric. Gone are the extensive and off-the-shelf combat exchanges with the conventional “enemy of the people” press.
Pink projections of the virus have been left behind, with failed promises that the nation “would be turning the pandemic around.”
In contrast to his predecessor, Biden has communicated with the public about the pandemic and the consequent economic devastation, acknowledging that things would get worse before it gets better.
“You had the old man saying that, well, you know, we’re just going to open things up, and that’s all we have to do,” Biden said at his first city council meeting as president last week. . “We said no, you have to deal with the disease before the economy can grow.”
A pattern emerged: the president and his team would deliberately set low expectations, especially in vaccinations and school reopening, and then try to gain a political victory by surpassing that schedule.
How low? On Friday in Michigan, it only offered the chance for the country to return to normal by the end of the year. “God willing, this Christmas will be different from the previous one, but I can’t make that commitment to you,” he said.
Biden’s team has installed a new discipline on the walls of the west wing. The new president has only held an extended question and answer session with reporters, and his exchanges in the oval office or before boarding Marine One have been brief.
The White House messages contain the assessments Biden made in his inaugural speech: The United States is being tested and the answers will not be easy.
The daily press sessions are back, this time in sign language. The pets are once again strolling through the White House lawn. The fires cross the chimney of the White House. Biden says he starts his day exercising, making coffee and eating yogurt or Raisin Bran.
At his town hall act in Wisconsin, Biden spoke repeatedly about how he doesn’t want to talk about the ex-boyfriend.
“I’m sick of talking about Donald Trump, I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” he said. “For four years, all that has been reported is Trump. For the next four years, I want to make sure all the news is from the American people. ”
It is a high order. The former president maintains his position on millions of supporters and its blockade in much of the Republican party, whether or not it ends up running again.
But as far as Biden can, he is doing what Obama envisioned during the 2020 campaign if he wins the Democrat. Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris would allow them to ignore the Washington circus again, Obama said at a rally and would give some predictability to Americans whether they like the Biden course or not.
“You don’t have to think about it every day,” Obama said. “It simply came to our notice then. You will be able to make your own lives “.