Biden’s style belies ambitions beyond undoing Trump’s legacy

Photographer: Al Drago / The New York Times / Bloomberg

The new president of the United States begins his days with a morning workout in the gym at the White House residence, watching MSNBC or CNN, and ends them at a reasonable hour often with a bowl of Breyers chocolate ice cream.

He doesn’t read Twitter unless someone shows him a tweet and posts from his own accounts are written by other people and are almost never news. According to his assistants, he reviews informational books from 7:30 a.m. on weekdays and receives informational information mostly every day.

He needs masks at the White House. His interactions with journalists and his public appearances are limited and managed by scenarios, and even then there are stumbles that require cleaning by his staff.

In both politics and style, Joe Biden has made rapid progress in shaping the presidency in his own image, drawing obvious contrasts – often deliberately – with his mercurial predecessor, Donald Trump. He is determined not to take up so much space on the stoves of American minds.

In turn, Americans respond positively. It had an overall rating of 60% in one The AP-NORC survey was published this week and garnered a 70% approval rating for its treatment of the pandemic.

But Biden’s unobtrusive presidency masks his desire to dramatically reshape the country, ambitions that extend far beyond simply erasing Trump’s legacy or reactivating Barack Obama’s agenda.

He has already challenged Congress to pass what would be the second-largest stimulus in U.S. history to eliminate the pandemic, as well as a review of immigration that could make millions of undocumented people gain citizenship. Coming soon: a multi-a trillion-dollar plan to build roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure projects across the country, redo the energy and manufacturing sectors, and potentially rewrite the tax code.

It has taken the first steps towards racial inequality and climate change, two of the most divisive issues. And he has widely exercised presidential power, issuing 54 executive orders and other actions during his first five weeks in office, more than any other president in the same period.

Biden voters “did not send him here to be a landmark,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said in an interview. “He was not sent here to take small measures. He was sent here to overcome a pandemic that killed 500,000 people and to reverse a history of economic failure and begin to deal with our climate crisis and our racism.

On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers who once expected a couple in a president to step down by preaching “unity” are beginning to suspect there will be few real opportunities for bipartisan gains. Biden’s own party has begun to split between family faults between liberals and moderates, who enjoy excessive influence in the Senate.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who is considered persuasive in the White House, has already met twice with the new president.

“You have the sense, the distinctive sense that you want to be an active part in getting there,” he said, referring to the bipartisan agreement. “Just so you understand how, I guess, how you make more sausage, you can see that you could press the right buttons, so to speak, instead of, you know, President Trump might try to do things from the point executive view “.

But he added: “I’m not sure what’s to come” at the meetings.

Six weeks into his presidency, Biden has yet to sign any legislation despite his desire to move quickly, let alone the $ 1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that has been the focus of its administration. Although he initially planned to address a joint session of Congress in February, like all his recent predecessors, the moment has faded as he waits for the stimulus to pass.

The tightly divided Senate and Trump’s second impeachment trial have left Biden’s cabinet confirmation far behind. There are only 13 out of 23 cabinet members, compared to Trump’s 18 of 22 at the time of his presidency.

Khashoggi cleaning

At 78, Biden is the first former president of the United States in history. Although assistants under the age of half insist that Biden exceeds them, the president sometimes misreads his teleprompter or injects involuntary inaccuracies into his observations. His staff had to correct him publicly after a misrepresentation last weekend.

After the administration released an unwritten intelligence report a week ago that blamed the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and sanctioned Saudi officials for the assassination of Biden he said twice that additional actions would come from the United States to punish the kingdom. “Monday”.

An administration official clarified that the only thing that would come on Monday were more details about the sanctions that had already been announced.

At a CNN town hall meeting in early February, Biden reported that the administration had invoked the Defense Production Act to expedite the distribution of vaccines. But he misinterpreted and called the law a “National Defense Act.”

Much of the next day’s press session was devoted to explaining what Biden had meant the night before.

But Biden’s age also confers advantages: he has immense confidence in his own dominance of the federal government and in his familiarity with Congress, and enjoys long relationships with many lawmakers on both sides.

At an Oval Office meeting with a bipartisan group of mayors and governors last month, Biden responded abruptly after a participant offered a suggestion on the passage of the pandemic relief bill in the Senate.

The president said he would manage the policy of the legislation and that he had taken state and local leaders to the White House to talk about the virus response in their areas and how the federal government could help.

Jeff Williams, the Republican mayor of Arlington, Texas, said Biden made the comment “jokingly” and that he and the other elected officials were not offended.

“Everyone laughed when they realized, ‘You’re right, what are we doing talking to him about the political part?’ And everyone respected it and went back to the bottom, ”said Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, a Democrat.

Meanwhile, the White House has moved quickly at the request of congressional, state and municipal leaders, especially with regard to the pandemic, they say.

Rapid vaccines

Less than a week after meeting with Biden and expressing concerns about the distribution of vaccines in his area, Miami Republican Mayor Francis Suarez received a call from the administration to make him knowing that a federal mass vaccination site would open in Miami-Dade County, He said. After the whip of most of the house, James Clyburn, recommended to Biden that he use federally qualified health centers to get vaccinated, the administration announced a policy to get it in a few days.

“It simply came to our notice then. They did it over the weekend, ”Clyburn said.

Biden took office stating that his top priority would be to curb the pandemic and has publicly shown a White House focused almost exclusively on the task.

Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, became the president’s top medical adviser. Covid-19’s almost daily briefings were resumed. The president hardly spends a day without discussing the state of the pandemic and the U.S. vaccination effort, and has set out to wear a mask almost whenever he is in public, even though he has received both doses of the Vaccina Pfizer Inc.

There have been times when he has relaxed his precautions: Biden invited the governors of Michigan and Wisconsin to travel with him in the presidential limousine when he visited his states, for example.

Biden frequently talks about the death toll from the pandemic in his public appearances, offering another contrast to Trump, who struggled to show empathy and rarely mentioned the human account.

“He’s seen very hard things throughout his life,” Klain said. “He has a center, an emotional solidity that comes from having experienced a triumph and a tragedy that I think makes him so fit to be president right now.”

Biden marked half a million American deaths with a solemn ceremony on the south lawn of the White House, lined up by a ladder that Trump climbed on his return from hospitalization for Covid-19 with dozens of candles representing the lost lives.

“The day will come when the memory of the loved one you lost will bring a smile to your lips before you have a tear in your eye. Arrive at. I promise you, ”he said at the event on February 22. “My prayer for you, however, is that this day will come sooner rather than later.”

The pandemic limited Biden’s face-to-face interactions during his campaign, but vaccination has helped him resume some of the popular behaviors that are at the core of his public personality.

The president has relied on intimacy in his White House meetings, keeping almost all of them in the oval office. Several people who also visited the White House during previous administrations said they had never been to the office before Biden, a gesture they interpreted as a sign of respect.

Negotiator failure

Still, Biden has not shown much progress on a basic promise of his presidential campaign: what he described as a unique ability to work through the aisle.

The convocations of 10 Republicans in the Senate to commit to the stimulus legislation resulted in a single meeting with the president and some follow-up notes. Now, each side blames the other for the failure of the negotiations.