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      Biden's outspoken nominee to run budget office deletes 1,000 tweets

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      [embedded content]
      Joe Biden’s nominee for a key economic post has deleted more than a thousand of her own tweets, some of which were critical of senators who now hold her fate in their hands.
      The Daily Beast first reported the steps by Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank who Biden has nominated to lead the federal Office of Management and Budget.
      “Can people on here please focus their ire on [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell and the GOP senators who are up [for re-election] this cycle who enable him,” Tanden wrote in June 2019, in a tweet recovered by the Beast.
      Tanden named those “enablers” as Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, John Cornyn, David Perdue, Thom Tillis “and many more”.
      A tweet calling McConnell “#MoscowMitch”, a common nickname for the majority leader among liberals during the investigation of Donald Trump’s links to Russia, was also among those deleted.
      Tanden’s fate may hinge on two runoff elections in Georgia in January. If Democrats win both seats – one held by Perdue – they will control the Senate via Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president. That would make Tanden’s confirmation achievable – if party discipline held.
      But Tanden, a former policy aide to Hillary Clinton, has also been a fierce critic of senators from the Democratic side of the aisle, for example the progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.
      “It’s an odd choice for Biden and his ‘healing’ presidency to bring someone in who is so combative, especially on Twitter, being that we just ended a four-year Twitter presidency,” Josh Fox, a climate activist and Sanders surrogate, told the Beast. “She causes ire unnecessarily.”
      Fox also said CAP “pretends to be aligned with progressive values, but Neera Tanden seems so cynical that she attacks progressive policies like a ban on fracking, the Green New Deal and Medicare for All”.
      The Massachusetts progressive Elizabeth Warren is among prominent Democratic senators who have backed Tanden.
      Republicans have been quick to tell reporters Tanden will not be confirmed if their party can help it. On Monday, Cornyn, from Texas, told reporters he thought Tanden was Biden’s “worst nominee so far”.
      “Her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, [create] certainly, a problematic path,” he said.
      The Beast said Tanden had deleted at least one tweet in support of MJ Hegar, the Democrat Cornyn beat for re-election last month.
      Speaking on MSNBC, Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator from Missouri, accused Republicans of displaying “a whole new level of hypocrisy”.
      “The Republican senators are now all of a sudden worried about tweets that hurt their feelings,” she said. “This is just ridiculous.
      “We’ve had a president who has used his Twitter account like a battering ram, going after not just his political opponents but Republican senators, unfairly, with incredibly brutal tweets. Now all of a sudden it’s a disqualification for someone to serve in the cabinet that engaged in her own opinion on Twitter? I think that’s dumb.”
      In a statement emailed to the Guardian, a transition spokesperson said Biden would “choose the most-qualified, most experienced candidates capable of leading on day one” and “looks forward to working in good faith with both parties in Congress to install qualified, experienced leaders.
      “The president-elect has been heartened to see a number of Republican senators express their desire to work together and indicate that they believe that presidents deserve latitude in building their team.”
      Jen Psaki, Biden’s incoming White House press secretary, said Tanden was “a brilliant policy expert and she knows how vital funding for [government] programs is. As a child, for a period her family relied on food stamps to eat, on Section 8 vouchers to pay the rent and on the social safety. Her fresh perspective can help meet this moment.”
      Tanden did not comment on the Daily Beast report. She tweeted: “After my parents were divorced when I was young, my mother relied on public food and housing programs to get by. Now, I’m being nominated to help ensure those programs are secure, and ensure families like mine can live with dignity. I am beyond honored.”
      She has also changed her Twitter biography. It now reads: “Director of OMB nominee, liberal, Indian American, feminist, mom, wife. Not in that order. Views expressed are most definitely my own.” More

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      Joe Biden announces all-female media team at his White House

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      The president-elect announces senior communications team, led by campaign communications director Kate BedingfieldPresident-elect Joe Biden will have an all-female senior communications team at his White House, led by campaign communications director Kate Bedingfield.Bedingfield will serve as Biden’s White House communications director, and Jen Psaki, a longtime Democratic spokeswoman, will be his press secretary. Continue reading… More

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      Biden bids to placate the left as he builds centrist transition team

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      So far, Joe Biden has avoided one of the biggest potential pitfalls of the transition process that will end with him moving into the White House: infuriating the left wing of the Democratic party.Yet Biden’s transition has also yielded the results he wanted in terms of ushering in a team of experienced figures drawn mostly from his own circle of friends and advisers who have given a decidedly centrist tone to the incoming administration.Biden has so far named his senior staff, who don’t require confirmation from the Senate, to a generally positive response. As he’s begun unveiling his nominations for cabinet secretary positions, the reaction from leftist quarters of the Democratic party – and its cadre of often young activists primed to attack – has mostly turned out to be be a mix of yawning and marginal grumbling.There has also been applause for naming women and people of color to top posts in an administration that also includes Kamala Harris as vice-president.“I appreciate that the Biden transition is trying to make an argument for diversity of its selections, but if we’re being honest, what we’re seeing is a valuing of experience in people who have served in key important posts and [who] understand what it’s going to take to try to be effective bureaucrats in those posts,” said Faiz Shakir, the manager for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.“As a progressive, I care deeply about vision and what you want to do when you hold those posts. However, that is not to dismiss or downplay the value of experience. So they are selecting for their experience and that has its upshots.”So far, Biden has avoided nominating ostentatious prospects to cabinet posts, opting instead to bring in veterans of the agencies they are set to run.Biden picked Antony Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state, to run the state department. Biden picked former secretary of state John Kerry to a new high-ranking post as climate tsar. Biden named Jake Sullivan, a longtime national security aide to the former vice-president to be national security adviser. To serve as director of national intelligence Biden picked Avril Haines, a former deputy director of the CIA. For the treasury department, Biden plans to appoint the former Federal Reserve chairwoman, Janet Yellen.More telling is who Biden hasn’t appointed. He hasn’t brought on a liberal standard-bearer like Elizabeth Warren. And the president-elect passed over Democrats with a national profile who campaigned for him, like the former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg whose name had been floated for ambassador to the UN. He picked Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former ambassador and state department official. The former Obama administration national security adviser Susan Rice was seen as a frontrunner for that job.Yet the progressive groups most eager to bash top agency picks from such an establishment Democrat like Biden are somewhat satisfied.“We are encouraged by Joe Biden making one of his first major appointments John Kerry, as it demonstrates the urgency of taking bold, global action on the climate crisis,” Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the Justice Democrats political action committee said in a statement.“But America also needs a domestically focused climate tsar who directly reports to the president and will oversee an Office of Climate Mobilization agreed to in the Biden-Sanders taskforces.”We are encouraged by Joe Biden making one of his first major appointments John KerryShakir called the Blinken pick “a solid choice”. When Ron Klain was announced as chief of staff, Warren even tweeted that he was a “a superb choice”. The liberal outside group Democracy for America called Yellen a “historic, progressive choice for Fed Chair in 2013. If selected, she’ll be a historic, progressive choice for treasury secretary.”There are signs, though, that the Biden administration and liberals are just enjoying a perhaps temporary detente as the Trump era winds down and before Biden has even occupied the Oval Office. Not all appointments have been without grumbling.Liberal groups have expressed opposition to the longtime Biden adviser Bruce Reed, possibly running the Office of Management and Budget, an agency charged with producing the administration’s budget. Leftwing congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have signed a petition against Reed, calling him a “deficit hawk” and criticizing his past support for benefit cuts, like social security.There have also been rumblings that the transition could meet turbulence if Biden decides to install Brian Deese, a former OMB official, at the head of the national economic council. Some of the strongest ire from liberals has been directed at the idea of the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel becoming secretary of transportation.The constellation of progressive activists and groups that form the left of the party also have preferred candidates. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the Bernie Sanders-aligned Our Revolution group want New Mexico congresswoman – and Native American – Deb Haaland to run the Department of the Interior.The importance of progressives battling with Biden over nominees is that it could complicate his ability to set up a functional cabinet and retain the broad electoral coalition that elevated him to office.But the real sticking point to Biden’s choices is likely to be confirming these nominees with a Senate where Democrats either have a slim majority or are still stuck in the minority with Republicans in control. That issue will be decided by two Georgia run-off Senate races that will go to the polls in early January, with both parties pouring huge amounts of cash and manpower into the contests.“It is a tremendous dark cloud over the personnel process,” said Bill Dauster, a former deputy chief of staff to then Democratic-Senate leader, Harry Reid. Dauster added that “it’s clear from statements Republicans have made that they intend to ration out their Senate confirmations in a stingy way”.Part of Biden’s argument to placate senators – like Sanders and Warren – who had been angling for influential administration posts is that their current position is essential in the powerful upper chamber of American government.“We already have significant representation among progressives in our administration,” Biden said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. “One thing is really critical: taking someone out of the Senate, taking someone out of the House – particularly a person of consequence – is a really difficult decision that would have to be made. I have a very ambitious, very progressive agenda. And it’s gonna take really strong leaders in the House and Senate to get it done.”Justice Democrats shot back that Biden’s picks could have been better, and in that response statement offered a list of non-white male progressives for the remaining cabinet positions.Biden so far has avoided naming any senator to a cabinet position, and instead prioritized agency experience above all else. Reinforcing that priority, there are signs that Sally Yates, a former acting attorney general, is the heavy favorite to run the Department of Justice. Outgoing Alabama senator Doug Jones, a longtime friend of Biden’s who has kept in contact with him, is another potential candidate, although Yates appears more likely. More

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      Beware going 'back to normal' thoughts – normal gave us Trump | Robert B Reich

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      “Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised on Thursday in a Thanksgiving address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid-19, but you could be forgiven if you thought he was also making a promise about life after Trump.
      It is almost impossible to separate the two. To the extent voters gave Biden a mandate, it was to end both scourges and make America normal again.
      Despite Covid’s grim resurgence, Dr Anthony Fauci – the public health official whom Trump ignored and then muzzled, with whom Biden’s staff is now conferring – sounded guardedly optimistic last week. Vaccines will allow “a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by as we get well into 2021”.
      Normal. You could almost hear America’s giant sigh of relief, similar to that felt when Trump implicitly conceded the election by allowing the transition to begin.
      It is comforting to think of both Covid and Trump as intrusions into normality, aberrations from routines that prevailed before.
      When Biden entered the presidential race last year, he said history would look back on Trump as an “aberrant moment in time”.
      The end of both aberrations conjures up a former America that, by contrast, might appear quiet and safe, even boring.
      Trump called Biden “the most boring human being I’ve ever seen”, and Americans seem to be just fine with that.
      Biden’s early choices for his cabinet and senior staff fit the same mold – “boring picks”, tweeted the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (referring to Biden’s foreign policy team), “who, if you shook them awake and appointed them in the middle of the night at any time in the last decade, could have reported to their new jobs and started work competently by dawn”. Hallelujah.
      All his designees, including Janet Yellen for Treasury and Anthony Blinken for secretary of state, are experienced and competent – refreshing, especially after Trump’s goon squads. And they’re acceptable both to mainstream Democrats and to progressives.
      They also stand out for their abilities not to stand out. There is no firebrand among them, no Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (at least not so far).
      For the same reasons, they’re unlikely to stir strong opposition from Republicans, a necessity for Senate confirmation, particularly if Democrats fail to win the two Senate runoffs in Georgia on 5 January.
      And they’re unlikely to demand much attention from an exhausted and divided public.
      Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.
      That’s because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.
      Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.
      Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. Normal is 40 years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.
      Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money – an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.
      Normal is worsening police brutality.
      Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.
      Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic party that for years has been abandoning the working class.
      Given the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities. The moment we are now in – with Trump virtually gone, Biden assembling his cabinet, and most of the nation starting to feel a bit of relief – is a temporary reprieve.
      If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see. And health and environmental crises that make the coronavirus another step toward Armageddon.
      Hence the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir the pot.
      It’s a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.
      So the question is: in an exhausted and divided America that desperately wants a return to normal, where will Biden find the energy and political will for bold changes that are imperative? More

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      What do progressives make of Joe Biden's cabinet picks so far? | Nathan Robinson

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      Joe Biden has now announced his transition team and a number of his cabinet appointees, giving us some idea of how he can be expected to govern. It’s very much true that “personnel is policy” and that the records of the people he chooses for key roles can indicate what kind of president he intends to be.How are the picks so far? Well, the bad news for progressives is that there has not yet been a single person announced that the left can be enthusiastic about. The best that can be said of the nominees is that they are generally “not as bad as we might have feared”. Some of the choices are deeply concerning. Others border on the unobjectionable. Most are relatively predictable, as Biden is making it clear he intends to hew as closely as possible to the Democratic politics of the Obama years. Here are a few worthy of note.Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, is one of the Obama veterans, having previously served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state. Blinken is a card-carrying member of what is sometimes called the “Blob”, the DC foreign policy establishment, which has a consensus set of beliefs that the US must remain a dominant global power, and a willingness to use military force to maintain that power.Blinken previously broke with Biden to support the (disastrous) armed intervention in Libya and has argued that Israel should keep receiving colossal amounts of US military aid even if it refuses to honor international agreements. (He also suggested that the US would never publicly criticize the Israeli government.) Blinken’s statement that diplomacy needs to be “supplemented by deterrence” is a sign that he will have little interest in reining in the sprawling US global military empire, and his statements about “undermining” and “isolating” Russia suggest we could see an increase in the cold war-type rhetoric that has been gaining such an alarming foothold in the Democratic party.In fact, at a recent Aspen Security Forum discussion, Blinken favorably quoted from the cold warrior George F Kennan, who argued that the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist and needed to be dealt with through “containment”. Blinken said Kennan’s worldview was “eerily up to the moment”, though Kennan’s views escalated the tensions that nearly led to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Blinken’s appointment is taken as a sign that “internationalism is back” in the White House, but it’s an internationalism that divides the world into America’s allies and its rivals.Janet Yellen as treasury secretary offers little to complain about, though it is notable that Biden did not heed calls to put a trust-buster like Elizabeth Warren in the role. Yellen is a highly respected academic economist and former Federal Reserve chair who is relatively apolitical, and her appointment has excited other Democratic economists including Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman. Even the socialist economic analyst Doug Henwood says Biden “could have done a lot worse” than Yellen. The good news about Yellen is that she is not an advocate of austerity policies and has spoken of the need for the government to extend “extraordinary fiscal support” during the pandemic.On immigration, climate change, and foreign policy, the administration needs to be subjected to ceaseless public pressureThe appointment of John Kerry as special envoy for climate is perhaps Biden’s way of signaling that he takes climate change seriously – as Democrats up until now tragically have not. I say it’s “Biden’s way” because it’s not necessarily a good way to show a commitment to taking serious action on climate – Kerry has “stature” and “experience”, and, thank God, actually does believe in the reality of climate change (unlike the present administration). But he is also known as a man long on words and short on actions. Even worse, Kerry favors an approach to dealing with climate change that rests on commodifying and selling nature rather than preserving it as our common inheritance.He recently published an op-ed explaining “how to better tackle climate change” which focused entirely on nudging the free market into putting a price on carbon. Nothing about how to deal with the equity effects of carbon pricing (ie making sure the financial burden doesn’t end up falling on the poor). Nothing about the federal government taking action to convert the electric grid, shutting down fossil fuel-reliant power stations, and investing in renewable energy. Nothing about a Green New Deal. And given Kerry’s record of defending the expansion of US fossil fuel production under Obama, he’s very unlikely to get tough on the companies most responsible for the problem. Climate activists should be incredibly concerned by the appointment of Kerry, who may acknowledge that the problem exists, but will almost certainly attempt phony business-friendly “solutions” and half-measures. It will require a huge fight to get the Biden administration to take real action. More

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      Biden wants to extend an olive branch to Republicans. He shouldn't | Joshua Craze and Ainsley LeSure

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      Shortly after Biden was declared president-elect, he announced that he would reach a hand across the aisle. “We must stop,” he said, “treating our opponents as enemies. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” This is the Biden playbook at work, honed through years of compromises made with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell: appealing to the Republican elite in office, while trying to appeal to moderate Republicans on the ground.Having stretched out its hand to the Republicans, the center of the Democratic party then turned to its real enemy – the left that it blames for its poor showing in the election. Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger led the charge, contending that “no one should ever say ‘defund the police’ ever again”. Despite the fact that progressive candidates did well across the ticket, and Biden ran a campaign modelled on Hilary Clinton’s neoliberal program, centrist Democrats blamed the core demand of the Black Lives Matter movement for alienating moderates. In centrist Democrats’ telling, the problem is the left – and the answer is to reach out to that poor soul, the moderate Republican.The moderate Republican is a myth. For all the Lincoln Project’s assertions that it would peel away Republican voters, the president actually secured a larger share of the Republican vote than he did in 2016. Some 94% of Republicans looked back on the debacles and racism of the last four years and concluded that they wanted more. This is not a delusion; it is the core of the Republican party. Biden would like to frame his presidency as a return to normality after the Trumpian exception. The reality, however, is that Trump doesn’t represent something new; it emerges from the long shadow that white supremacy cast over American history.We need to acknowledge that the core white Republican voter knows exactly why they vote for Trump. Propelled by Fox News and talk radio, the Republican voter chooses their party because the Republicans guarantee the continuity of white supremacy both economically and culturally. When Trump campaigned to save the suburban (white) woman from the urban poor, he was mocked as hopelessly out of touch. Despite the promises of the pollsters, however, his strategy worked: Trump’s share of the white female vote increased to 55%.While white supremacy is not novel in America, it is likely to become increasingly vitriolic. The US is projected to become minority white by 2045, and the Republican party has decided to resist this demographic shift by rallying its base and using the tools of American politics to hang on to minority white government for as long as it can.If the Democratic party is not going to squander the opening that the people have made, it must change how it orients itself to the American peopleFor instance, as Biden was fervently appealing to moderate Republicans, two white Republican canvassers refused to certify electoral results from Michigan’s overwhelmingly black Wayne county. Trump’s post-election strategy is indicative of that of the Republican party more generally: disenfranchise voters of color by any means possible, and use gerrymandering and the unrepresentative alchemy of the electoral college system to produce Republican political power.When Biden reaches across the aisle, it is likely his hand will be met by turned backs; most Republicans haven’t even acknowledged the election result yet. There is little for the Republican establishment to gain from working with Biden. With the Senate liable to remain in Republican hands, and the Democrats seemingly more worried about appealing to Republicans that taking substantive action over the economic crisis brought about by Covid-19, Mitch McConnell can rub his hands together at the thought of the 2022 mid-terms.For the Republican party to actually want to work in a bipartisan way would require the Democrats gaining support for the kind of systematic political reform – of the electoral college system, for instance – that the very gesture of reaching across the aisle is likely to prevent.We have been down this road before. While Biden spent the 2020 election campaign insisting he wasn’t a socialist, in 2008, Obama came to power having distanced himself from the “radical” agenda of Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor. Obama also faced an economic crisis, and took a bipartisan approach, shoring up the banks and creating only a modest stimulus package. The result? After a two-year campaign of determined obstruction by Mitch McConnell, the Republicans rode a Tea party wave all the way to a midterm majority in the House of Representatives in 2010.It doesn’t have to be this way. In the 2020 election, voter turnout was the highest it has been since 1908. Black voters were crucial in delivering a Democratic victory, and preventing a continuation of white minority rule. If the Democratic party is not going to squander the opening that the people have made, it must change how it orients itself to the American people. Rather than exploiting black support while marginalizing the black voices that push against a neoliberal political agenda, the Democratic party should give black voters the respect that it has thus far reserved only for that fantasy: the moderate Republican.The Democratic party cannot have it both ways. There are red and blue states. There are Americans who want to defend white supremacy, and Americans who are struggling over what the refusal of white supremacy looks like on American soil. Biden can commit the Democratic party to building a genuinely post-white America, or he can try and placate the white supremacist project of the Republican party. But he must choose.Joshua Craze is a writer-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva
      Ainsley LeSure is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Brown University specializing in post-civil rights racism and democracy More

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      Joe Biden says ‘this is not a third Obama term’ in first sit-down interview

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      In his first sit-down interview since the election, President-elect Joe Biden declared his presidency would not be “a third Obama term” and promised to represent the full spectrum of the country and the Democratic party.
      Speaking with NBC News’ Lester Holt on Tuesday evening, Biden said the challenges facing him were unique and sought to shake off the shadow of the man who he served as vice-president.
      The interview came as Biden announced a slew of cabinet nominees, which included many alumni of the Obama administration.
      “What do you say to those who wonder if you’re trying to create a third Obama term?” asked Holt.
      “This is not a third Obama term. We face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration,” Biden answered. “President Trump has changed the landscape.”His administration aimed to represent the “spectrum of the American people as well as the spectrum of the Democratic party” Biden added, agreeing that he’d even consider appointing a Republican who voted for Trump.
      “I want this country to be united,” Biden said.
      He also said that he wouldn’t “use the justice department as my vehicle” to investigate Donald Trump and his allies, despite pressure from some Democrats to ensure the president’s financial dealings, and allegations that he sought foreign interference in the election, are further investigated. When Trump leaves office in January, he will lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.
      But Biden said he’d rather his administration stay out of the fray. “There are a number of investigations that I’ve read about that are at a state level. There’s nothing at all I can or cannot do about that,” Biden said.
      Biden expressed his wish to pursue a “progressive” agenda. Asked if he’d consulted with progressive senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on cabinet appointments, the president-elect said “there’s nothing really off the table” when it comes to who he’ll tap to join his administration. But, he said, “taking someone out of the Senate, taking someone out of the House … is a really difficult decision that will have to be made”.

      Although progressives have lauded Biden’s decision to nominate Janet Yellen for treasury secretary and appoint Ron Klain as chief of staff, prominent leftist voices including representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have expressed wariness that Biden might pick Bruce Reed, a former Biden chief of staff, to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). “We are extremely concerned by the reports that Reed is a frontrunner to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the Biden administration, given his history of antipathy towards economic security programs that working people rely on,” the congresswoman said in a petition she cosigned, along with other progressive leaders.
      With more administration staff announcements pending, Biden told Holt the team is focused on coordinating a transition, noting that the Trump administration’s outreach “has been sincere”.
      “They’re already working out my ability to get presidential daily briefs,” he told Holt. “We’re already working out meeting with the Covid team in the White House. And how to not only distribute, but get from a vaccine being distributed to a person being able to get vaccinated.”
      On Wednesday, Biden will deliver a Thanksgiving address, from Wilmington, Delaware, and will “discuss the shared sacrifices Americans are making this holiday season and say that we can and will get through the current crisis together”, according to the transition team.
      It will likely stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s turkey pardoning today. Trump thanked healthcare workers and celebrated vaccine development advances, but did not offer condolences for the families of the quarter-million who’ve died of the coronavirus.
      The president-elect has taken pains to paint himself and his administration as foils to Trump and Trump’s administration. On Tuesday, while the president tweeted, in all caps, “America First”, Biden outlined during a Wilmington press conference his vision for a country “ready to lead the world, not retreat from it”.
      He told Holt that he was pleased to have spoken to “over 20 world leaders”, and said, “they are really excited”.
      • This article was amended on 25 November 2020. An earlier version used the word “weariness” when wariness was meant. More