US Politics

Downing Street has said it is up to Joe Biden how he decorates the Oval Office, after it was reported that a bust of Winston Churchill, lent by the UK government, has been removed.
“The Oval Office is the president’s private office, and it’s up to the president to decorate it as he wishes,” Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said, adding: “We’re in no doubt about the importance President Biden places on the UK-US relationship, and the prime minister looks forward to having that close relationship with him.”
Johnson’s relaxed attitude is in marked contrast to his criticism of Barack Obama, when the former president moved the Churchill bust aside.
Writing in the Sun in 2016, Johnson, then London mayor, and the author of a Churchill biography, called Obama’s decision a “snub,” suggesting it may have been because of “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.
A bust of Mexican American labour rights leader Cesar Chavez was visible in pictures of Biden signing executive orders on Wednesday.
The prime minister, who was referred to by Donald Trump when he was president as “Britain Trump”, is keen to strike up a strong working relationship with the socially liberal Biden, who the government hopes will attend the G7 meeting in Cornwall in June.
Johnson’s spokesman was forced to field a string of questions about whether Johnson is “woke”, after the shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, described Biden as a “woke guy,” referring to his support for Black Lives Matter and trans rights.
Asked about her comments on Wednesday, Johnson appeared uncomfortable, before remarking that there was, “nothing wrong with being woke”.
When the prime minister’s spokesman was asked whether Johnson would consider himself “woke”, he said: “You would have to define that, but you’ve got the PM’s views on what he believes, and specifically on his agenda to level up across the country, and ensure that everybody has the opportunity to succeed.”
The Conservatives believe publicly rejecting socially liberal policies such as the removal of historic statues with colonial connections will help them to score points over Labour.
The communities secretary, Robert Jenrick, has said he will legislate to prevent historic statues being removed, “at the hand of the flash mob” or by a “cultural committee of town hall militants and woke worthies”.
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Johnson’s remarks about Obama, made during the buildup to the Brexit referendum, caused a furore. It subsequently emerged that Obama had simply moved the bust of the wartime leader – a loan from the UK government – to a spot in his personal residence.
When Theresa May rushed to Washington in early 2017 to be the first world leader to visit Trump in the White House, he swept her into the Oval Office to show that Churchill had been restored to prominence. More

Bernie Sanders’ mittens may have become the unexpected must-have fashion accessory of Joe Biden’s inauguration, but those hoping to steal the Vermont senator’s look are in for a disappointment. The teacher who made them and gave them to Sanders says she has none for sale.The mittens that sparked hundreds of internet memes were made from repurposed sweaters and recycled plastic by Jen Ellis, 42, a second grade teacher who lives in Essex Junction, Vermont, just outside of Burlington, where Sanders was mayor in the 1980s.“I don’t have any mittens to sell. I don’t really do it a lot any more. I’m flattered that they want them, but there are lots of people on Etsy who sell them and hopefully people will get some business from them. But I’m not going to quit my day job,” Ellis told the Jewish Insider in an interview on Wednesday night.She explained that the demand had been overwhelming. “I am a second grade teacher, and I’m a mom, and all that keeps me really busy. There’s no possible way I could make 6,000 pairs of mittens, and every time I go into my email, another several hundred people have emailed me.”She went on to say: “I hate to disappoint people, but the mittens, they’re one-of-a-kind and they’re unique and sometimes in this world, you just can’t get everything you want.”“It’s been unexpected,” she said of their sudden social media fame. “He must really like them if he chose to wear them.”Ellis said she was not a regular social media user, and had struggled to remember the login for her Twitter account.Asked about his outfit, Sanders told CBS News in an interview after the ceremony: “In Vermont, we dress warm – we know something about the cold. We’re not so concerned about good fashion. We want to keep warm. And that’s what I did today.”Sanders’ outfit rapidly became an internet meme. He was Photoshopped into historic photographs, comic panels and the subway, while sitting, arms folded, wrapped up warm against the DC winter weather, wearing that spectacular pair of mittens. Indeed, #BerniesMittens became one of the trending hashtags of the inauguration.There was also political speculation about what might be fuelling the senator’s mood.And this appears to be true.Meme veterans also noted that Sanders was wearing the same practical and sturdy coat that had become internet-famous in a video where he had appealed for financial support at the end of 2019.The truth is, we have an excellent chance to win the primary and beat Trump.But the only way we can do that is if we have the sufficient financial resources.So I am asking you today to contribute to our campaign before the FEC deadline: https://t.co/9y9BZMs0GM pic.twitter.com/wnYbUDBynW— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 30, 2019
Since that post, the picture has appeared repeatedly on social media, with the caption replaced to say: “I am once again asking …” followed by a joking topical reference.An earlier photo from the day, picturing Sanders carrying a folder of documents, also caused a stir on social media when the director Rian Johnson responded to a fan who had superimposed the label “Knives Out 2 script” on to the folder. Johnson jokingly suggested he had given a draft script of the keenly anticipated potential sequel to 2019’s surprise hit movie Knives Out – but had heard nothing back yet. More

In so many ways it was all so gloriously, spectacularly, crushingly normal. The ceremonial rituals, the military band, the procession of dignitaries, the sprinkling of stars, and the entirely forgettable inaugural speech.
But for the pandemic masks, the death toll of more than 400,000 Americans, and the small army to deter another white supremacist insurrection, the scenes on the west side of the Capitol were the first signs of a restoration of democracy that came perilously close to collapse.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr swore to protect and defend the constitution on a giant family Bible that was bigger than his home state of Delaware. It appeared helpful for crushing large insects and small insurrectionists.
If anything survives in our collective memories of Biden’s speech, it will be the 46th president’s commitment to what used to be boilerplate language about the vital struggle to preserve democracy and rebuild something close to national unity.
“Today we celebrate the triumph, not of a candidate, but of a cause. The cause of democracy,” Biden began. “The people, the will of the people, has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded. We’ve learned that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.”
It almost didn’t, of course. With a few more Republicans in the House, the will of the people would have been overturned. With a few fewer Republican state officials willing to stand up for free and fair elections, Biden’s autocratic predecessor would have been standing on that same spot. With a few more insurrectionists, several of those members of Congress seated on the Capitol steps might not have borne witness to history on Wednesday.
Beyond defeating the pandemic, Biden called out three priorities that could never have emerged from the mouth of the man who promised, four years ago, to put America First.
“A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” Biden promised. “A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, that we must confront and we will defeat.”
Inaugural speeches typically try and fail to reach for historic stature. The Biden administration does not need to reach for history when history has dumped one of its greatest piles of destruction on its doorstep.
The man now at the center of it all is a true believer in the notion that all politics is personal. He is a tactile politician who touches everyone literally, figuratively and most often hyperbolically. Citing Abraham Lincoln at the signing of the emancipation proclamation, Biden said he was typically, characteristically, literally, all in.
“Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation,” he said. “And I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the foes we face: anger, resentment and hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. With unity, we can do great things, important things.”
At that point, the progressive wing of the Democratic party rolled its collective eyes towards the heavens. Meanwhile, the fascist wing of the Republican party prepared to use that unity line in every speech defending its attempts to divide the nation and destroy democracy.
Still, that’s Joe Biden, and as the man likes to say: God love ya.
“Hear one another. See one another. Show respect to one another,” he beseeched the nation and the members of Congress beside him.
“Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war. And we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated, and even manufactured.”
Earlier on a cold January morning in the nation’s capital, a beleaguered world said good riddance to the raging fire of Trump’s presidency. It ended in a spasm of garbled thoughts, lies and language that represent the core character of the loser of last year’s election.
Trump was always a caricature of the 1980s, trapped in an amber world where greed is still good, conspicuous consumption is always plated in gold, and the mix tape only plays totally inappropriate hits like YMCA.
And so it came to pass that the colossal buffoon who pretended to be president for four years spoke to a miserably small crowd of blood relatives and paid help on the concrete at Joint Base Andrews. The TV pundits bravely suggested the scene resembled some campaign-like event, which would be true if the campaign was a jumble sale to repair a leaking roof.
Trump shuffled off the presidential stage, showing off his rather large personal collection of lies, big and small.
He pretended that his family had toiled in the White House rather than serve itself and watch TV (“People have no idea how hard this family worked”). He pretended that he respected his wife Melania, and that she was not in fact the least popular first lady on record. He fabricated once again his record of war veterans support.
And he flat-out invented a performance on job creation that was the very worst since Herbert Hoover. “The job numbers have been absolutely incredible,” he declared, in ways that are indeed barely credible.
He talked about a stock market that rose like “a rocket ship up” and he talked, confusingly, about vaccine numbers that would “really skyrocket downward”. A rocket ship that launched and crashed to earth may be the most honest, if least intended, self-description of the Trump era. Perhaps this was finally the day when Trump sounded like the president he was, just a few minutes before he was no longer president he wanted to be.
“I wish the new administration great luck and great success,” said the man who wished a violent mob into storming the Capitol to deliver something other than great luck and success two weeks earlier.
So farewell then, Donald Trump. Your predecessor, Barack Obama, liked to say that presidents are part of a long-running story. “We just try to get our paragraph right,” he said.
Your paragraph was nasty, brutish and short. And you got it badly wrong. More

I have long extracted glamour out of being a citizen of both the US and the UK, supposing that double passports indicate a certain sophistication. That internationalism also seemed like a safety belt on the world’s highway, and I trusted that if one of my countries went to hell in a handbasket, I could retreat to the other one. Recent years have not been kind to that presumption. The only thing that has made Boris Johnson’s premiership look remotely palatable has been living under Donald Trump, and as Trump’s reign of horror draws to its unseemly close, I reckon with the sad fact that he has changed not only America, but also me. I am angrier, more confused, more frightened and more cynical than four years ago, and suppose that the audacity of my prior hope, like some lost ethical virginity, can never be won back.It’s easy and dull to catalogue the president’s particular lies and transgressions. What is both harder and more important is to assess a cumulative effect that he has lacked the perspicacity to discern himself. In seeking to undermine stories in the mainstream media case by case, he convinced many Americans that truth itself was conditional. During his first week in office, his senior counsellor Kellyanne Conway talked about “alternative facts”. Americans have always been divided about troubling events, but until Trump, there was at least broad agreement about what those events were. Arguing with Trump’s supporters, one is presented with narratives that bear as much relationship to what happened as creationism does to the theory of evolution.I never bought into Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” idea of the US; even at its finest, America remained a deeply flawed, prejudiced, unequal society built on the blood of Native Americans and slaves. But flawed, too, were all the others, and the United States offered a message of hope to beleaguered places where the oppression was worse. While the CIA was orchestrating the assassinations of fairly elected leaders deemed undesirable in the Middle East and Central America, the rhetoric of human rights rang loud across the populace and the political spectrum. We had defeated fascism and stood up to communism, Maoist or Stalinist. We sent aid to countries aligned with our commercial and strategic interests, but at least the glowing tinge of generosity sweetened our cultural imperialism. We entangled ourselves in fruitless wars for misbegotten reasons, but also stood by our allies in tough times. Wealth was unevenly distributed, but we emblematised, for a short while, unprecedented social mobility. We also briefly stood at the acme of invention: technical, medical, artistic, even social. How we were was badly lacking, but it seemed good enough to rationalise our talk about moral leadership.Over the past year, research took me deep into the American hinterlands. In Trump country, I found that ordinary ethics – decency, honesty, generosity, love for one’s fellow human beings, tolerance – were not merely undervalued but effectively desecrated by people who thought such ideals corroded strength and that strength was what mattered. I patiently laid out the argument that abandoning basic standards in fact weakened the country, but I might as well have told the bully who tortured me when I was eight years old that I knew a philosophy within which his assertions of dominance constituted evidence of narcissistic inadequacy. That bully would have punched me in the mouth before I finished my sentence, and so, metaphorically, did the Trumpists.America is a cruel, racist society. The Black Lives Matter protests bridled at the prejudice that occasioned the Trump presidency, the white working class’s desperate last stand to sustain their vanishing supremacist birthright; that, at least, has been the narrative in the liberal press. I don’t believe it was a last stand, any more than I think the “patriots” who invaded the US Capitol on 6 January were fringe actors whose depravity will be extirpated by arresting those whose faces can be identified from security videos. The civil war brewing in the US bears alarming similarities to the one that split the nation in 1861. Demographics are shifting, and for the first time people of colour, including Latinx people, make up the majority of Americans under the age of 16. But white people were a minority in South Africa during apartheid, and Anglo rulers were a relatively minuscule faction during the Raj: the notion that population statistics will vanquish these mobs is wishful thinking.I always knew there was no shining city, but there’s not even much of a hill any more. One has despaired at Trump’s ineptitude, though complaining of the unskilfulness of an autocrat is like grousing about small portions of inedible food. Now, the humiliated dragon thrashes about while Biden preaches good-hearted competence. After four years of malevolence, this is a welcome shift, but it will not on its own save the riven country, its broken courts, its legislators sheltering for safety in the Capitol but refusing to wear masks or pass through metal detectors. Unleashing these last four years’ consuming hatred was pretty straightforward; containing it will require genius.Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who ran for the presidency herself, told me this week that the Democratic administration has to start by building trust in a country where no one believes anything put forward by the party for which he or she did not vote. The steepest task facing this newly Democratic Congress, she added, is to make bipartisan legislation the norm again, to demonstrate that party politics can be sidelined when laws benefit the American people. Biden and Harris will have to show that the purpose of holding power is not merely to hold more power.The word “superpower” was bandied around often when I started writing for a living, fresh out of university in 1987. When the USSR collapsed, I bought into the supposition that America was the only superpower and that that would be good for the world. I have since disavowed wanting to be a superpower and questioned whether superpowers obtain – but whatever America was, it no longer is. Barack Obama has recently said he is “not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America”. If America seems merely possible to Obama, how can it seem any better to the rest of us? Something new may eventually be built on the ruins, but no one will rebuild what used to be there.This cynicism sits in me like a kidney stone, a pain beyond reckoning. I love America and meet good people here every day. I love my American citizenship but have initiated the process of obtaining a third passport from ancestral Romania or Poland, though neither looks appealing right now. I worry that there are no desirable passports left, that the world just barely breathes through the nauseous coating of filth that Trump has thrown over us all. The possibility of America? It has abandoned us. God save the president.• Andrew Solomon is a psychologist and author, and winner of the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression More

It was a day that many had waited a long time for. Jonathan Freedland and Richard Wolffe break down what happened on inauguration day 2021, as Donald Trump fled to Florida, and Joe Biden signed 17 executive orders, overturning much of the work of his predecessor

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Mere hours after Joe Biden took the oath of office, he had signed 17 executive orders undoing some of the work of his predecessor, Donald Trump. Trump fled Washington DC for Mar-a-Lago, setting the stage for an inauguration ceremony filled with words of hope and unity that had been missing for four years. Jonathan and Richard run through the events of Wednesday, marking its importance in history along the way. Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has marked the start of his presidency by signing a flurry of executive orders on a suite of issues, including Covid-19, the environment, immigration and ethics.Some of the executive actions undo significant actions from Donald Trump’s administration, including halting the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries, and ending the declaration of a national emergency used to justify funding construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border.He also signed an order allowing the United States to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and end the Trump administration’s efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census data used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets.The president also moved quickly to address Covid-19, signing orders to mandate mask wearing and social distancing in federal buildings and lands and to create a position of a Covid-19 response coordinator.In other moves, Biden also revoked the permit granted for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline and instructed all executive agencies to review executive actions that were “damaging to the environment, [or] unsupported by the best available science”. Biden also ordered all executive branch employees to sign an ethics pledge and placed limits on their ability to lobby the government while he is in office. The new president also ordered federal agencies to review equity in their existing policies and come up with a plan in 200 days to address inequality in them.On his first day in office, Biden signed 17 executive actions – 15 will be executive orders.As he began signing the orders, Biden, wearing a mask and seated behind the resolute desk said: “I think some of the things we’re going to be doing are bold and vital, and there’s no time to start like today.”It’s not unusual for an incoming president to take executive action immediately after being sworn into office, a move meant to show the nation that the newly inaugurated president is getting to work. But the breadth and volume of Biden’s immediate executive orders underscore how quickly the new president intends to move in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic and turning the page from the Trump administration.“These executive actions will make an immediate impact in the lives of so many people in desperate need of help,” Wade Henderson, the interim president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. “Reversing Trump’s deeply discriminatory Muslim ban, addressing the Covid-19 crisis, preventing evictions and foreclosures, and advancing equity and support for communities of color and other underserved communities are significant early actions that represent an important first step in charting a new direction for our country.”The flurry of activity from Biden came on the same day that Democrats formally took control of the US Senate as the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were formally sworn in as the two senators from Georgia. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York, is now the Senate majority leader, while Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, is now the minority leader.Speaking from the Senate floor Schumer was momentarily breathless, saying: “We have turned the page to a new chapter in the history of our democracy and I am full of hope.”McConnell, in his first remarks as the minority leader, also focused on a message of unity.“Our country deserves for both sides, both parties, to find common ground for the common good everywhere we can and disagree respectfully where we must,” he said. “The people intentionally trusted both political parties with significant power to shape our nation’s direction.”[embedded content]He also praised Kamala Harris’ historic achievement after she was sworn in as America’s first female vice-president.“All citizens can applaud the fact that this new three-word phrase ‘Madam vice-president’ is now a part of our American lexicon,” McConnell said.Looming on the horizon is the second impeachment trial for Trump, who the US voted to impeach earlier this month. In addition to Covid-19 relief, Democrats are also expected to push legislation dealing with immigration reform and voting rights.Even though Democrats have a majority of votes in the Senate, they still face significant obstacles to get them through. That’s because Senate rules require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, a procedural move that can be used to halt legislation. Some progressives have called for ending the practice, which would allow Democrats to pursue sweeping legislation without GOP support, but it’s unclear if the party will do that. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterIn his final hours of office, Donald Trump pardoned a former Google engineer who was convicted of stealing trade secrets from the company before taking up a new role with competitor Uber.Anthony Levandowski, 40, had been sentenced in August 2020 to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to inappropriately downloading trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car operation Waymo, where he was an engineer.The surprise pardon was remarkable for its star-studded list of supporters and its justification. “Mr Levandowski [pleaded] guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation,” read the White House announcement. “Notably, his sentencing judge called him a ‘brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs’.”The single guilty count was the result of a plea bargain; the engineer was originally charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. And the sentencing judge, William Alsup, described Levandowski’s theft as “the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen” and refused the engineer’s request for home confinement, saying, it would give “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison time is the answer to that.”Levandowski had not yet begun his prison sentence due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A hearing on the timing of his prison sentence had been scheduled for 9 February.Levandowski was a leader in the race to develop self-driving cars. He made a name for himself in the autonomous vehicle space after building a driverless motorcycle in a contest organized by the Pentagon’s research arm, Darpa, in 2004.Levandowski went on to found his own startup, 510 systems, which was acquired by Google in 2011. At Google, he helped to develop driverless cars until 2016. Upon leaving the company and while negotiating a new role at Uber, he later admitted, he downloaded more than 14,000 Google files to his personal laptop.Whether any secrets from those files made their way into Uber’s self-driving technology became the center of a bitter legal battle between the two tech giants that resulted in a $245m settlement for Google’s self-driving spin-off, Waymo, and criminal prosecution for Levandowski.The White House cited the support of 13 individuals in its pardon statement, including the billionaire Facebook board member Peter Thiel and several members of his coterie: Trae Stephens and Blake Masters, who have both worked for Thiel’s various investment firms, and Ryan Petersen, James Proud and Palmer Luckey, who have all received investments for startups from Thiel.Thiel donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign, spoke at his nominating convention, and gave a press conference in which he argued that the then-candidate’s calls for a ban on immigration by Muslims should not be taken “literally”. In 2016, as Thiel was growing more engaged with the pro-Trump far right, Thiel met with a prominent white nationalist, BuzzFeed News reported. As Trump’s presidency floundered, Thiel distanced himself from his former support.Luckey is best known as the founder of Oculus, the virtual reality headset startup that was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in 2014. His politics came under scrutiny during the 2016 campaign when it was revealed that he was funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” and anti-Hillary Clinton memes, and he was pushed out of Facebook in 2017. In July, his new startup, Anduril Industries, won a five-year contract with US Customs and Border Protection to provide AI technology for a border surveillance.Other supporters of the pardon include the former Disney executive Michael Ovitz and three of Levandowski’s attorneys.Levandowski was one of 143 people to be granted clemency by Trump on his last day in office. The former president has pardoned 70 people and commuted the sentences of a further 73 people. The recipients include Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon, rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, the Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and scores of others.The White House said Levandowski had “paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good”.Since his legal troubles began, Levandowski has founded a new self-driving car company and established a church focused on “the realization, acceptance and worship of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software”. The website for the Way of the Future Church appears to have become defunct at some point in March or April 2020.Reuters contributed to this report. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterIt was a day of historic firstsWith her hand on two Bibles – one from the late Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, and one from family friend Regina Shelton – Kamala Harris became the first woman, and the first Black and South Asian American woman, to become the vice-president. She was sworn in by the supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina on the nation’s highest court. It was an emotional moment for many across the country. “In tears watching this extraordinary moment for women in the US and the world,” said Oprah Winfrey.Soon after her inauguration, Harris swore Democrats Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff and Alex Padilla into the Senate. Warnock is the first Black senator from Georgia, and Ossoff is the first Jewish senator from the state. Padilla, who was appointed to take the California Senate seat vacated by Harris, is the first Latino senator to represent a state where Latino residents make up 40% of the population.“As I traveled to Washington from Los Angeles, I thought about my parents and the sacrifices they made to secure the American dream for their son,” Padilla said.“It’s a new day, full of possibility,” said Warnock, who has the unique title of “senator reverend” – his last job was pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr used to preach.A new Senate later voted to confirm Avril Haines as the director of national intelligence – and she became the first woman to hold the post.The pandemic cast a pall over the dayThe inauguration took place amid a pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 Americans. An event that would normally have drawn a crowd of hundreds of thousands instead saw a far smaller audience, with attendees donning face masks and practicing social distancing. In lieu of an inaugural ball, Biden and Harris held a virtual celebration, which the Guardian’s arts writer Adrian Horton describes as a “seamless Zoom compilation” of speeches and performances. There were cheery, even joyful moments. Harris was escorted to the White House by the famed Showtime Marching Band of Howard University, her alma mater.But there was a heaviness hanging over the day. In his inaugural address, Biden said: “I would like to ask you to join me in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those we lost this past year to the pandemic.“To those 400,000 fellow Americans – mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, friends, neighbors, and co-workers. We will honor them by becoming the people and nation we know we can and should be.”Reversing Trump’s legacy was Biden’s first order of businessJust hours after taking office, Biden signed a stack of 17 executive actions aimed at reversing Donald Trump’s legacy on public health, immigration and the climate crisis.His first move was to mandate masks and physical distancing in federal buildings, and on federal land. In a sharp contrast to his predecessor, who denied public health research and refused to cover his face, Biden did so while wearing a mask.The 46th president halted Trump’s travel ban aimed at Muslim-majority countries, ended emergency funding for the construction Trump’s border wall, and moved to rejoin the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization.Biden also ended the Trump administration’s efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census, which is used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. “I think some of the things we’re going to be doing are bold and vital, and there’s no time to start like today,” he said.There was a return to presidential normsMany Americans rightly point out that we shouldn’t long for a return to normal, after the coronavirus pandemic and racial justice reckoning made clear that normal wasn’t working.As the poet Amanda Gorman asserted, in her inauguration performance, “We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice.”With normalcy out of the question, Biden nonetheless reinstated some presidential norms and traditions. He’s bringing dogs back to the White House after his predecessor became the first president in a century to refuse a presidential pet. He had his executive orders fully vetted by the Office of Legal Counsel, “underscoring a commitment to regular order/rule of law,” NPR’s justice department correspondent Carrie Johnson wrote.One of the most significant norms to return: daily press briefings. During a cordial first briefing, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki answered some questions, obfuscated a bit, and promised to return the next day. After weeks and weeks without a coronavirus update from top health officials, Psaki promised that those become a regular affair as well.Journalists will still have to maintain their skepticism. But after the hostile, fantastical – and ultimately absent – press briefings of the Trump era, hearing Psaki say, “I’d love to take your questions,” came as a relief to many in the press corps.The outfits were inspirationalYes, it was a grave, historic, momentous day. But did you see Michelle Obama’s Coat? Or Jill Biden’s? Or Kamala Harris’ suffragette-purple? Or Bernie Sanders’ cozy beige Burton and scene-stealing mittens?It was a big day for coats, gloves and mittens. While Obama’s flawless monochromatic maroon look by the Black designer Sergio Hudson drew gasps, Sanders’ grumpy-chic, eco-friendly knitwear look launched a thousand, or ten thousand memes. Amid the array of sartorial choices, there was something for everyone. Janet Yellen’s was blanketed. Harris’ daughter Ella Emhoff wore bedazzled Miu Miu.Honored guests and dignitaries, young and old, all served us thrilling looks. There was baby Beau Biden in a navy bonnet. Kamala Harris’s niece Meena Harris rocked sparkly cowboy boots, and her husband, Nikolas Ajagu, came in Air Jordan Dior 1s.It was a nice reprieve to admire, for a few moments, some fun clothes – before we again had to grapple with the many, many struggles and challenges that still lay ahead. More