Eliana Willis

On Wednesday in Washington DC, a striking young woman stood at a podium on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by the country’s leaders, who were masked against the pandemic. She was unmasked, at a safe distance, so she could speak with resonance and force, spreading her enthusiastic vision without danger. She radiated joy, conviction and purpose as she declaimed the poem she had written to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th president of the US: The Hill We Climb. Tears sprang from the eyes of many listeners, those weary and wary from four years of domestic discord, whether they sat on folding chairs at the Capitol, or on easy chairs in their homes. Hearing her words, they felt hope for the future.That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman. She is America’s first national youth poet laureate and, at 22, she also is the youngest poet accorded the honour of delivering the presidential inaugural poem. But despite her youth, Gorman’s assurance and bearing made her seem to stand outside time. Erect as a statue, her skin gleaming as if burnished, her hair cornrowed, banded with gold and drawn tightly back into a red satin Prada headband, worn high like a tiara, she evoked what poet Kae Tempest calls the “Brand New Ancients”: the divinity that walks among us in the present day. According to Greek mythology, nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, inspire creative endeavour, with five devoted to different kinds of poetry – epic, romantic, lyric, comic or pastoral and sacred. Gorman suggested a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.Gorman told the New York Times that she had not wanted to dwell on the rancour, racism and division of America’s four years under the Trump administration: she wanted to “use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal”. That way would require action, her poem declares: “We lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another, we seek harm to none and harmony for all.”Gorman knows the importance of taking action to make the change you want to see. Raised in Los Angeles by a single mother, Joan Wicks, a middle-school English teacher, Gorman overcame daunting obstacles to forge her path. Amanda and her twin sister Gabrielle, an activist and filmmaker, were born prematurely. In kindergarten, the future poet was diagnosed with an auditory disorder that gave her a speech impediment. When she was in third grade, a teacher introduced her to poetry, and it was through writing and reciting poetry that she found her voice. She found a role model in the poet Maya Angelou, whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings reminded her of her own life, she remarked in one interview: “[Angelou] overcame years of not speaking up for herself, all for the love of poetry.”Gorman has presidential plans. ‘I am working on hashtags,’ she told the Harvard Gazette. ‘Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar’As Gorman struggled to improve her spoken fluency, she also strove for social justice. For her, it was clear from the start that expression was to be both poetic and political. In 2014, at the age of 16, she founded a non-profit organisation to support poetry workshops and youth advocacy leadership skills, called One Pen One Page. The following year, she published her first poetry book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, and went to Harvard to study sociology. (She graduated in 2020.) Her clarity of expression received a turbo boost from musical theatre while she was in college, with the arrival of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, whose lyrics she memorised and recited (the song Aaron Burr, Sir helped her pronounce her “R”s, she has said).In the spring of her sophomore year in 2017, she was named America’s first national youth poet laureate, an honour that took her and her poetry to public events across the country. At one of these, held at the Library of Congress, Dr Jill Biden heard her read a poem she had written in the wake of the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, titled In This Place (An American Lyric). Three years later, Biden, as first lady-elect, suggested the young poet for the inaugural honour.In the first week of January, Gorman was halfway through writing The Hill We Climb when a mob of angry Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in an attempt to violently overturn the election result. She finished the poem in the hours after the melee, undeterred, with that jarring tumult as backdrop.On inauguration day, Gorman wore a ring depicting a caged bird, a gift from Oprah Winfrey that attests to the link the young poet represents between the past and the future. It not only summoned thoughts of the poet’s first inspiration, Angelou; it reminded anyone looking for portents that Angelou, as the US poet laureate, had also recited a poem to a new president on the Capitol steps: Bill Clinton, in 1993. One day, Gorman may be the audience, not the author, of such a poem: she has presidential plans. “I am working on hashtags,” she told the Harvard Gazette. “Save the 2036 date on your iPhone calendar.” The last lines of The Hill We Climb, containing an intended echo of Miranda’s Hamilton, constitute a poetic battle cry: “We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”Her words not only electrified Washington, they have prompted a surge of admiration in the public at large. That same day, her two forthcoming books were Amazon’s top two bestsellers. Instagram feeds flash continuously with images of her triumphal stand at the Capitol; op-eds across the country have called for poetry education programmes in schools, and television news broadcast highlights of her performance hour after hour – lyric adrenaline bursts to reanimate democracy.Gorman has appeared on many of these news programmes. On one, Good Morning America on ABC, Miranda made a surprise appearance to congratulate her. “The right words in the right order can change the world; and you proved that yesterday,” he told her. “Keep changing the world, one word at a time.”As if anyone could stop her. As she writes in her forthcoming book, Change Sings:
I can hear change hummingIn its loudest, proudest song.I don’t fear change coming,And so I sing along. More

Monday
It’s a subdued Martin Luther King Day in the US, and we take a bus across town to visit MoMA. I haven’t been to the modern art museum in New York since before my children were born and this feels like the week for it. Everyone is jittery about the inauguration on Wednesday, about news of the Covid death count hitting 400,000 in the US and about American democracy under strain. Perhaps art will lift us.
It is odd to get cabin fever in a city of 8.5 million people, but that is how New York feels right now; stagnant, airless, expectant. A friend recently flew to LA for work, something I used to hate and now regard with intense jealousy. I turn to my sluggish children, complaining their legs hurt before we’ve even reached the museum, and give them a version of the pep talk about New York from the end of Meet Me in St Louis: “Everybody dreams of going there, but we’re luckier than lots of families because we’re really going!” Or in our case, we’re already here. “Aren’t we lucky?” I trill. Flat looks of contempt all round and a refusal to go up the stairs to look at the impressionists.
There are other things to enjoy at MoMA. The half-tyre thing embedded in the floor with bottles on top of it. The shiny prism things hanging off the ceiling. The rock things in a heap. The fibreglass mermaid. We stop in front of a large screen and too late I remember the effect of video installation on my wellbeing. This one features a two-second clip of Wonder Woman – Linda Carter’s original from the 80s TV show – stepping forward and back, over and over on a loop. My children stop, excited, before getting the measure of the thing and turning to me in baffled rage. “What is this?” they demand. I shrug. Things repeat; the fictions we tell ourselves doom us to endless circularity; even superheroes get stuck in a rut. “What can I tell you, it’s art.”
Tuesday
It’s a week of renewal, hope, regeneration and moving on, by which, of course, I refer not to the inauguration of Joe Biden but to Ben Affleck throwing out a lifesize cardboard cutout of his ex-girlfriend, Ana de Armas. As the Daily Mail reports on Tuesday, after happening upon the event via long lens, the cardboard figure is so awkward a shape for general rubbish disposal that it takes “two grown men” – neither of them Affleck, although for a short, heady period there is speculation one might be his brother Casey (it isn’t) – to get rid of it.
It is the second story of the week to feature a middle-aged male movie star gone to seed, the other, of course, being Russell Crowe, who became tetchy with a fan on Twitter after he criticised Crowe’s almost 20-year-old movie Master and Commander. It’s a great movie and I’m 100% Team Crowe, who when photographed in Sydney, heaving himself about the tennis court, has – forgive me – a vague look of Steffi Graff about him that I’ve never quite been able to resist. If not entirely in on the joke, Crowe is at least self-mocking enough to absorb it.
Affleck, on the other hand, seems a man not remotely in touch with his preposterousness. Mocked for looking unhappy in trunks or carrying a tray of iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts with insufficient dignity, he is condemned to serve out his days as the butt of endless dopey memes. You could, if you tried hard, probably work up some observations about the American soul via Affleck, but perhaps that’s one to park for less feverish times. More

Representative Ilhan Omar began to fear for her life as soon as the evacuation began.She had watched from a balcony as a mob of insurrectionists invaded the US Capitol on 6 January, incited by the president of the United States. As she was escorted to a secure area, she made a phone call to her ex-husband, the father of her children.“I didn’t know if I would make it out that day and [I] just … made a request to him to make sure he would continue to tell my children that I loved them if I didn’t make it out.”They didn’t succeed in stopping the functions of democracy, but I do believe they succeeded in ending the openness of our democracy.Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota’s fifth district, a famed member of the progressive movement, and the first Somali American elected to Congress, has long endured threats and racist abuse from Donald Trump and his supporters. But it’s clear, during an interview with the Guardian on Zoom, that the events of 6 January have left a lasting and unique trauma.She takes long pauses as she recalls the details.“It was a very traumatizing experience, and all of us will be traumatized by it for a really long time,” she says. “The face of the Capitol will forever be changed. They didn’t succeed in stopping the functions of democracy, but I do believe they succeeded in ending the openness of our democracy.”Omar says she was evacuated to a secure location usually reserved only for senior congressional leaders. She says law enforcement believed “my life was at risk in the same way that congressional leadership’s life was at-risk” – citing a significant uptick in death threats in the two months before the presidential election, but adding: “For the better half of the last two years, the president has singled me out and has incited direct death threats against my life.”The 38-year-old who was first elected in 2018, was placed in the same room as the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, along with other senior figures from both parties.“Leaders from both sides seemed to be terrorised by what was taking place,” she says. “I don’t think any of them ever expected to be witnessing an insurrection against our government. And I think that watching the response from the president was completely unsettling for them as well … I think the fear of what we were dealing with grew and you could see that in the faces of all of them.”The day after the mob violence, Omar was among the first House Democrats to draft articles of impeachment, which were eventually voted through (with only 10 Republicans siding), marking a historic second impeachment of the former president. She is now urging the Senate to begin trial proceedings as top Republicans look to stall the process into next month.Although Omar is talking through Zoom but it’s clear she is distinctly uneasy as she remembers the events of 6 January, a marked contrast to her affable demeanor on the occasions we have spoken in the past. Is she still in a state of shock?“I don’t know if I would use the word shock,” she says. “I would say it all feels exhausting.”She levels this exhaustion not just at Trump but at the many Republicans who have essentially continued to support the former president by voting against impeachment or to challenge the 2020 election result.“There’s a set of expectations in functioning as a part of a long-existing democracy, and to have allowed a president to degrade our traditions and norms, make a mockery of our laws, our constitution and oaths of office. And then to still deal with people who are ‘two-siding’ every conversation, who don’t have an ability to understand the gravity of what we are dealing with … is pretty exhausting.”Omar attended Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday in a city under partial military lockdown following the insurrection. Like other colleagues in the progressive caucus of the party, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she had endorsed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary and did not always pull her punches when criticizing Biden’s primary run.Nonetheless, she expresses resolute optimism about the next four years and beams when discussing Biden’s first 48 hours in office, in which he has rescinded the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement.“There are things we’ve all been fighting for the last couple of years and to see a lot of that get done in the first day makes us all feel very optimistic and excited about what’s to come,” she says. “You know there will be plenty of time for us to disagree and fight some of our policy differences, but at the moment, as a progressive and as Whip of the progressive caucus, most of us are pretty pleased.”Still, she drifts back to reflections on the events of 6 January and worries about what she believes is potentially irreparable damage to the democratic process.“It dawned on me that my reality and the reality of many of the people who have served with both in the Minnesota House and in Congress is forever going to be shaped by these events,” she says. “In a free democracy, where we thrive on vigorous debate and discussion, without resorting to violence, [that] was no longer going to be part of our reality and that is truly shocking and disturbing and unsettling.” More

Joe Biden’s new administration is faced with a monumental task in curbing the deadliest wave of the Covid-19 pandemic so far in a race against time before a new, more contagious coronavirus variant threatens already strained US health resources.The Biden administration has mere weeks to speed vaccine deployment, and convince more Americans to wear masks, wash hands and social distance. And it must be done amid a rocky transition, critical supply shortfalls, widespread new infections, shaky public trust and a vaccine rollout that “has been a dismal failure so far”.“Let me be very clear, things are going to continue to get worse before they get better,” said Biden, at a Covid-19 briefing on Thursday afternoon. “The memorial we held last night,” to mark 400,000 American deaths, “will not be our last one. The death toll will likely top 500,000 next month.”More than 408,000 Americans have so far died from Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, and more than 24 million infected: by far the worst numbers in the world.To date, 16.5 million people in the US have been vaccinated, according to federal health authorities.At the same time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now issued stark warnings about a more infectious new variant of Covid-19, called B117. The variant has already forced England into a weeks-long lockdown.Various scenarios could play out. In one model, Covid-19 infections decline in March, only to crest again in late April and early May driven by B117 infections. This model assumed there was no widespread community vaccination. In another model, B117 still overtakes current strains, but it declines alongside current dominant strains. The decline would take place in an environment of overall reduced transmission, because people maintain social distance and vaccines are distributed to about 1 million a day.This endpoint can be reached, CDC modelers said, but only if people curb the spread of Covid-19 and vaccine uptake is high. Biden has repeatedly pledged to vaccinate 100 million Americans in 100 days, which would roughly match modeling by the CDC.“We need to ask average Americans to do their part,” said Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response director. “Defeating the virus requires a coordinated nationwide effort.”In the worst-case scenario, already strained hospitals would be under more pressure, social distancing would need to be more stringent and extended, and more people would need to be vaccinated to make a difference. That scenario more closely matches England’s lockdown, undertaken when cases peaked in early January.Further, while B117 is the only variant known to be more contagious currently circulating, it is not the only variant to be worried about. Strains identified in South Africa and Brazil also hold the potential to be more transmissible, CDC researchers said.In the face of these new variants, Biden and his administration spent its first evening and full day in office building infrastructure to respond to the crisis.“The issue he wakes up everyday focused on is getting the pandemic under control,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary at the first press briefing on Wednesday evening. “The issue he goes to bed every night focused on is getting the pandemic under control.”Biden has signed a flurry of executive orders to try to control the situation, including setting up new federal vaccination sites, using the Defense Production Act to boost much-needed supplies, requiring masks to be worn on federal property and numerous other actions. Zients acknowledged on Thursday that the Trump administration’s vaccine rollout planning was, “so much worse than we could have imagined”, the New York Times reported.Buy-in by America’s state governments is also important for distributing vaccines quickly and equitably. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who was closely aligned with Donald Trump, held a press conference on Wednesday to tell Biden not to bother coming to his state.“I saw some of this stuff Biden’s putting out, that he’s going to create these Fema camps. I can tell you, that’s not necessary in Florida,” DeSantis said, the Tampa Bay Times reported. “All we need is more vaccine. Just get us more vaccine.”Further, the urgency to vaccinate people has led some public health officials to shy away from documenting that vaccine recipients are members of priority groups, such as the elderly or essential workers.In Mississippi, the state’s top health official, Dr Thomas Dobbs, said requiring documentation is not something the state is “going to do” because he did not want to erect roadblocks to vaccination. He added: “We will get [the] vaccine out where we can as much as we can,” he said on Thursday. “It’s going to be a little bit lumpy, and that’s just the way it is.” More

Following the US Capitol riot, Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone travel to Washington DC for the week of Joe Biden’s inauguration to find a downtown area under what is essentially military occupation and a city coming to terms with the trauma of Donald Trump’s final days in office. 
They speak to lifelong residents in the outer suburbs as well the US congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who tells of her harrowing experience of the 6 January riot. Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton rails against criticisms of the Republican administration’s handling of the domestic terrorism threat
‘I didn’t know if I would make it out that day’: Ilhan Omar on the terror of the Capitol attack More

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterAnthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, spoke on Thursday of a “liberating feeling” of being able to speak scientific truth about the coronavirus without fear of “repercussions” from Donald Trump.Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endured a tortuous relationship with the former president and was increasingly sidelined from public briefings.But the 80-year-old returned to the White House podium on Thursday after Joe Biden released a national Covid-19 strategy and signed 10 executive orders to combat a pandemic that has now claimed more than 400,000 lives in the US.“One of the things that we’re going to do is to be completely transparent, open and honest,” Fauci told reporters. “If things go wrong, not point fingers, but to correct them. And to make everything we do be based on science and evidence.“That was literally a conversation I had 15 minutes ago with the president and he has said that multiple times.”Asked if he would like to amend or clarify anything he said during the Trump presidency, Fauci insisted he had always been candid, noting wryly. “That’s why I got in trouble sometimes.”Fauci and other public health advisers were forced to walk a delicate line as the president used coronavirus taskforce briefings to downplay the virus, push miracle cures and score political points. On one occasion Trump mused about injecting patients with disinfectant but the response coordinator Deborah Birx remained silent.Fauci’s frankness did not go unnoticed. During the election race in October, Trump reportedly told campaign staff: “Fauci is a disaster. If I listened to him, we’d have 500,000 deaths.” At a rally in early November, as crowds chanted “Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!”, the president suggested he might do just that.At Thursday’s briefing, Fauci was asked how it feels to no longer have Trump looming over him. “Obviously, I don’t want to be going back over history but it’s very clear that there were things that were said – be it regarding things like hydroxychloroquine [pushed as a treatment by Trump] and things like that – that really was uncomfortable because they were not based on scientific fact.“I can tell you, I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn’t feel that you could actually say something and there wouldn’t be any repercussions about it. The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is and know that’s it, let the science speak, it is something of a liberating feeling.”Although Biden had just condemned vaccine distribution under the Trump administration as a “dismal failure so far”, Fauci said the new team is “not starting from scratch” as it tries to get shots in arms more quickly. “I believe the goal that was set by the president, of getting 100 million people vaccinated in 100 days, is quite a reasonable goal.”He added: “If we get 70% to 85% of the country vaccinated, let’s say by the end of the summer, middle of the summer, I believe, by the time we get to the fall, we will be approaching a degree of normality.”Possible US plateauFauci told the briefing that, based on seven-day averages, the coronavirus may be plateauing in this US but warned that there can always be lags in data reporting. “One of the new things about this new administration: if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess,” he said.After Fauci’s return to the west wing, Nicole Wallace, a former White House communications director, told viewers of the MSNBC network: “It seems like this briefing will forever be remembered as the one where Tony Fauci got his groove back.”The executive orders signed by Biden establish a Covid-19 testing board to increase testing, address supply shortfalls, establish protocols for international travelers and direct resources to hard-hit minority communities. They also require mask-wearing in airports and on certain public transport, including many trains, planes and intercity buses.Fauci was followed at the restored daily White House briefing by the press secretary, Jen Psaki. She confirmed that the new administration would seek a five-year extension of the New Start treaty with Russia that limits the arsenals of both countries to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads each.The 2010 treaty, the last remaining arms control treaty in the wake of the Trump administration, is due to expire on 5 February, but an extension would be feasible if Russia agrees, even in the remaining two weeks. Vladimir Putin has signaled he is open to an extension.“The president has long been clear that the New Start treaty is in the national security interests of the United States, and this extension makes even more sense when the relationship with Russia is adversarial as it is at this time,” Psaki said. “New Start is the only remaining treaty constraining Russian nuclear forces, and is an anchor of strategic stability between our two countries.”But she added that the administration would “hold Russia to account for its reckless and adversarial actions” and that US intelligence would assess the Solar Winds cyber-attack last year, the attempted murder of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and reported Russian bounties for the killing of US soldiers by extremist groups in Afghanistan. More

Dr Anthony Fauci made not-so-veiled critiques of the Trump administration during a White House press briefing on Thursday. He said the new administration meant he did not need to ‘guess’ when he didn’t know the answer to questions.
The health expert said the new administration felt ‘liberating’ and he did not take pleasure correcting the president and facing consequences for doing so.
But Fauci pushed back against the characterization from some Biden officials that the new administration has to start ‘from scratch’ on coronavirus vaccine distribution
US politics: latest updates More

Joe Biden has urged Americans to wear face masks for 99 days as part of a challenge for his first 100 days in office during a speech on Thursday in which he unveiled his administrations’s national Covid strategy.
Biden signed an executive order to mandate face coverings during interstate travel and within federal buildings as he noted the US coronavirus death toll is higher than that from the second world war. More