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      The Guardian view on Joe Biden's inauguration: democracy prevails – for now | Editorial

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      It was a moment of immense relief across the world, rather than unbridled celebration. Washington saw an orderly transition of power at the Capitol, just two weeks after the attack on it; the departure of a man who has thrived on division and the anointment of Joe Biden, who pledges unity; the arrival of Kamala Harris – the first female vice-president and a woman of colour – after the racism and misogyny of Donald Trump. Yet there were no cheering crowds to greet the new president, and 25,000 members of the National Guard stood watch, thanks to his predecessor’s legacy: the deadly toll of the pandemic and the political violence epitomised by this month’s insurrection. That threat did not recede when the 46th president took his oath of office. It is part of America’s body politic, as are the bitter political forces that birthed it. Though Mr Trump was resoundingly defeated, more than 70 million Americans voted for him and a huge number of those now believe that President Biden stole his job. One in five voters supported the storming of the Capitol.Mr Trump, petty to the last, slunk away to Florida rather than face his defeat. But whether or not the twice-impeached ex-president can maintain political momentum, Trumpism in the broader sense is thriving. Its next standard bearer – there are plenty of hopefuls – could well be smarter and more dangerous. So the sombre mood was not only inevitable but apt. The perils facing the republic have rarely been greater. Mr Biden’s speech rose to the moment. He acknowledged the constant struggles of his nation, and the current dangers. But he also promised: “Democracy has prevailed … Our better angels have always prevailed.”The new president has promised a flurry of action, expecting little honeymoon. He must tackle the pandemic that has taken 400,000 American lives – a quarter of those in the past month – and the economic crisis, with 10 million fewer employed than a year ago; he plans a $1.9tn stimulus package. A slew of executive orders on his first afternoon – axing the Muslim travel ban; rejoining the Paris climate agreement – are set to reverse some of Mr Trump’s most egregious acts. But erasing the last four years is impossible. Only some policies can be enacted at the stroke of a pen. An ambitious legislative agenda must force its way through a 50/50 Senate. The Trump administration scrapped regulation and stacked courts. Above all, it tore apart the social and political fabric of the United States, making brazen lies, naked cruelty and hatred commonplace. Mr Trump was the product of his country’s failures, but further exposed and exacerbated them. Europe and other allies are breathing easier, but America’s standing cannot truly be restored until its domestic crises are resolved. At best, Mr Biden will begin to address them. He reminded his listeners that politics “does not have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path”, in a call for honesty and decency that should be heard not only in the US, but across the Atlantic. Yet others are still pouring on the fuel. While some Republicans belatedly scramble for the vestiges of respectability, others continue to foment lies. Facts have become optional in the age of disinformation.Changing the president, as hard as it has been, was an easy task set against the challenge of binding up the nation’s wounds. But this is, at least, the removal of a dangerous man and the arrival of a president who believes in his oath of office. This inauguration brings hope, however tentative, at a time when the US desperately needs it. More

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      Janet Yellen says Biden must 'act big' with coronavirus relief package

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      Janet Yellen, US president-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for treasury secretary, told lawmakers on Tuesday that “the smartest thing we can do is act big” on the next coronavirus relief package, adding that the benefits outweigh the costs of a higher debt burden.In testimony at her virtual confirmation hearing, Yellen said her task as treasury chief would be twofold: first to help Americans endure the final months of the coronavirus pandemic, and second to rebuild the US economy “so that it creates more prosperity for more people and ensures that American workers can compete in an increasingly competitive global economy”.Yellen observed that economists and others have noted that the recovery from the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic has been “K-shaped” – with the well-off bouncing back sharply while the less advantaged have slid further into financial difficulties. “This is especially true of people of color,” said Yellen.But Yellen noted that the K-shaped economy long predated the pandemic and said it was the treasury’s role to try to address these inequalities.Yellen’s testimony was a marked contrast to the Trump administration’s fiscal priorities. She called climate change “an existential threat” and argued international cooperation was needed to end the “destructive, global race to the bottom on corporate taxation.”Biden, who will be sworn into office on Wednesday, outlined a $1.9tn stimulus package proposal last week, saying bold investment was needed to jump-start the economy and accelerate the distribution of vaccines to bring the virus under control.“Neither the president-elect, nor I, propose this relief package without an appreciation for the country’s debt burden. But right now, with interest rates at historic lows, the smartest thing we can do is act big,” Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair, said in prepared remarks to the Senate finance committee.“I believe the benefits will far outweigh the costs, especially if we care about helping people who have been struggling for a very long time,” she said in the statement, which was obtained by Reuters.The proposed aid package includes $415bn to bolster the US response to the virus and the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, some $1tn in direct relief to households, and roughly $440bn for small businesses and communities particularly hard hit by the pandemic.Many Americans would receive stimulus payments of $1,400, which would be on top of the $600 checks approved in a pandemic relief bill passed by Congress last month. Supplemental unemployment insurance would also increase to $400 a week from the current $300 a week, and it would be extended to September.Yellen received an endorsement from all living former treasury secretaries, from George Shultz to Jack Lew, who urged senators in a letter to swiftly confirm Yellen’s nomination so she can quickly tackle “daunting challenges” in the economy.“Addressing these pressing issues will require thoughtful engagement by the Department of the Treasury. Any gap in its leadership would risk setting back recovery efforts,” the former secretaries wrote. More

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      Hello, Mr Resident: Is Palm Beach ready for the Trumps to move in?

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      The men sported tuxedos, the women extravagant evening gowns. They crowded into Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, unmasked and without any pretence at social distancing. After cocktails and a luxurious dinner, the partygoers danced in the new year to the live music of rapper Vanilla Ice and Beach Boy veterans.
      “We shouldn’t be caged in our homes,” said Amber Gitter, a local estate agent who attended. No government should “tell you that you have to stay in and can’t work”.
      Once Trump leaves the White House this week, the two-times impeached president is expected to reside at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. It’s an unhappy prospect for many Palm Beachers who fear Trump’s presence and maskless Mar-a-Lago soirees will undermine the tiny town’s tranquility and its fight against the pandemic. The display of unbridled wealth and partying at Mar-a-Lago highlights the awkward and ugly reality of a rich elite that continues to party while its poor working-class neighbours struggle to survive.
      Trump in Florida
      Nestled on an island off the coast of Florida, Palm Beach is a fixture for America’s 1%. Tree-lined South Ocean Boulevard, which runs past Mar-a-Lago, is nicknamed billionaire’s row, the site of some of the world’s ritziest beachside mansions. Residents include cosmetic heiress Aerin Lauder, billionaire financier Stephen Schwarzman and, notoriously, the now-deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump is not even the wealthy community’s first experience with presidents – John F Kennedy used his family’s property as a winter White House.
      Trump divides his future hometown’s residents, as he does all Americans. While he won the town’s vote in the 2020 presidential election and more than 500 followers paid a reported $1,000 a ticket to attend the Mar-a-Lago new year party, the president has feuded with neighbours and local officials. In 2006, Trump erected a giant flagpole at Mar-a-Lago, which violated local zoning rules. The town began fining him $1,250 a day. Trump sued and kept his flagpole. Mar-a-Lago declined to comment on either the dispute or its maskless parties.
      During Trump’s Mar-a-Lago presidential visits, dozens of police and secret service officers protected the property. Barricades blocked off the main road, creating traffic jams. A group of angry neighbours has sought legal advice to block him from living at Mar-a-Lago full-time, the Washington Post first reported. More

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      Joe Biden cannot govern from the center – quashing Trumpism demands radical action | Robert Reich

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      I keep hearing that Joe Biden will govern from the “center”. He has no choice, they say, because he will have razor-thin majorities in Congress and the Republican party has moved to the right.Rubbish. I’ve served several Democratic presidents who have needed Republican votes. But the Republicans now in Congress are nothing like those I’ve dealt with. Most of today’s GOP live in a parallel universe. There’s no “center” between the reality-based world and theirs.Last Wednesday, fully 93% of House Republicans voted against impeaching Trump for inciting insurrection, even after his attempted coup threatened their very lives.The week before, immediately following the raid on the Capitol, two-thirds of House Republicans and eight Republican senators refused to certify election results on the basis of Trump’s lies about widespread fraud – lies rejected by 60 federal judges as well as Trump’s own departments of justice and homeland security.Prior to the raid, several Republican members of Congress repeated those lies on television and Twitter and at “Stop the Steal” events – encouraging Trump followers to “fight for America” and start “kicking ass”.This is the culmination of the growing insanity of the GOP over the last four years. Trump has remade the Republican party into a white supremacist cult living within a counter-factual wonderland of lies and conspiracies.More than half of Republican voters – almost 40 million people – believe Trump won the 2020 race; 45% support the storming of the Capitol; 57% say he should be the Republican candidate in 2024.Trump has remade the Republican party into a white supremacist cult living within a counter-factual wonderland of lies and conspiraciesIn this hermetically sealed cosmos, most Republicans believe Black Lives Matter protesters are violent, immigrants are dangerous and the climate crisis doesn’t pose a threat. A growing fringe openly talks of redressing grievances through violence, including QAnon conspiracy theorists, of whom two are newly elected to Congress, who think Democrats are running a global child sex-trafficking operation.How can Biden possibly be a “centrist” in this new political world?There is no middle ground between lies and facts. There is no halfway point between civil discourse and violence. There is no midrange between democracy and fascism.Biden must boldly and unreservedly speak truth, refuse to compromise with violent Trumpism and ceaselessly fight for democracy and inclusion.Speaking truth means responding to the world as it is and denouncing the poisonous deceptions engulfing the right. It means repudiating false equivalences and “both sidesism” that gives equal weight to trumpery and truth. It means protecting and advancing science, standing on the side of logic, calling out deceit and impugning baseless conspiracy theories and those who abet them.Refusing to compromise with violent Trumpism means renouncing the lawlessness of Trump and his enablers and punishing all who looted the public trust. It means convicting Trump of impeachable offenses and ensuring he can never again hold public office – not as a “distraction” from Biden’s agenda but as a central means of re-establishing civility, which must be a cornerstone of that agenda.Strengthening democracy means getting big money out of politics, strengthening voting rights and fighting voter suppression in all its forms.It means boldly advancing the needs of average people over the plutocrats and oligarchs, of the white working class as well as Black and Latino people. It means embracing the ongoing struggle for racial justice and the struggle of blue-collar workers whose fortunes have been declining for decades.The moment calls for public investment on a scale far greater than necessary for Covid relief or “stimulus” – large enough to begin the restructuring of the economy. America needs to create a vast number of new jobs leading to higher wages, reversing racial exclusion as well as the downward trajectory of Americans whose anger and resentment Trump cynically exploited.This would include universal early childhood education, universal access to the internet, world-class schools and public universities accessible to all. Converting to solar and wind energy and making America’s entire stock of housing and commercial buildings carbon neutral. Investing in basic research – the gateway to the technologies of the future as well as national security – along with public health and universal healthcare.It is not a question of affordability. Such an agenda won’t burden future generations. It will reduce the burden on future generations.It is a question of political will. It requires a recognition that there is no longer a “center” but a future based either on lies, violence and authoritarianism or on unyielding truth, unshakeable civility and radical inclusion. And it requires a passionate, uncompromising commitment to the latter. More

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      Trump may be gone, but his big lie will linger. Here’s how we can fight it | Jonathan Freedland

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      The truth hurts, but lies kill. The past 12 months have demonstrated that with a terrifying clarity. Lies about Covid, insisting that it was a hoax cooked up by the deep state, led millions of people to drop their guard and get infected. And one big lie about the US election – claiming that Donald Trump had won, when he’d lost – led to the storming of the US Capitol and an eruption of violence that left five dead.The impact has been so swift, events rushing by in a blur, that it’s easy to miss the significance. On Wednesday, Donald Trump – already only the third US president in history to be impeached – was impeached again. In the first 222 years of the country’s existence, impeachment happened only once. Now that most severe, vanishingly rare of sanctions has struck twice in a single year.In the past, the impeachment process unfolded at a slow crawl: 11 months separated the day Bill Clinton vowed he’d never had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky and the vote in the House of Representatives to try him for high crimes and misdemeanours. This time it happened in a week, the speed a function of two unusual circumstances: first, the accused has only days left in office; second, those House members were witnesses, Congress the scene of the crime.Unusual too is that this decision was not taken on wholly partisan lines. Ten Republicans broke ranks to put Trump in the dock. Though that only emphasises that 197 Republicans did not: they apparently find it acceptable for a president to incite a violent insurrection against the nation’s democratically elected assembly. Next comes a trial in the Senate. The conventional wisdom says that it will fail – that most Republican senators, terrified of their party’s Trump-worshipping base, will follow the lead of the 197 rather than the 10 – especially once Joe Biden is sworn in at noon on Wednesday and the urgent need to remove Trump from power has faded.Still, it’s possible that the cannier Senate Republicans will adopt the icy cynicism of Mitch McConnell – who briefed that he is open to convicting the president – and seize the chance to be rid of the Trump incubus once and for all. If enough of them vote guilty, then in a second vote the Senate can bar him from holding public office ever again. Ambitious Republicans, eyeing the 2024 contest, are already gaming out that scenario – some of them perhaps within Trump’s own family. Has Ivanka pulled out of attending Biden’s inauguration because she wants to remain viable with the base? If so, she’ll first have to contend with her brother, Donald Jr.And yet, even if Republican leaders manage both to banish Trump and prevent a dynastic succession, they will not be rid of him. It’s become a truism to say that Trumpism will linger, but there is an even more direct legacy that will hang around like a foul stench. That is the fiction that propelled those crowds to break into the halls of Congress: the big lie of the stolen election.“The lie outlasts the liar,” wrote the eminent historian of Nazism Timothy Snyder. If Trump’s supporters continue to believe that their man won big last November – and even now only 22% of Republicans consider the election free and fair – there is no reason why their anger at that theft should abate over the next four years. On the contrary, it will grow and fester, demanding payback in 2024, by force if necessary. Snyder notes darkly that 15 years separated the invention of the big lie that Germany lost the first world war thanks to a Jewish “stab in the back” and Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to power. Myths endure.All of which raises a much bigger question than what to do with Donald Trump: what to do about the big lie and, more deeply, about the climate in which millions have come to believe it’s true. There has been much diagnosis of the post-truth phenomenon that Trump came to embody, but what about a remedy?A first requirement is to tailor the treatment. The philosopher Prof Quassim Cassam, author of a study of conspiracy theories and their appeal, distinguishes between the producers and consumers of such fictions. The pedlars of lies may have a casual, smirking insouciance towards the truth, but that’s not true of their audience. Those who stormed Congress were not dismissive of truth’s importance; on the contrary, they were prompted to act because of what they believed to have been a vital, hidden truth.The task, then, is not to restore public regard for veracity so much as to equip citizens to distinguish between what’s factually true and what is false. To that end, the philosopher has an unexpected suggestion. Get those who swallow conspiracy theories to ask of those supplying them the very questions they usually direct at the supposedly lying establishment: cui bono? Who benefits from this version of events? What’s their agenda? Except now they won’t be interrogating the BBC or the New York Times but the likes of Alex Jones and the disseminators of the QAnon fantasy. What exactly are they getting out of spinning these tales? A tidy profit, for one thing.Similarly, one might also ask the believers, what’s in it for you? How does believing the QAnon story that a Satan-worshipping ring of paedophiles controls the US government help you? How does it address any of the underlying problems in your life? If you feel life and opportunity have passed you by, how does subscribing to QAnon help? Perhaps it provides a spurious kind of explanation, but it doesn’t make your lot any better. Admittedly, a university professor is not perhaps the ideal carrier of that message. Better, says Cassam, might be a former conspiracy theorist, someone who has broken free.The most obvious corrective to lies are the facts that people can see with their own eyes. Few people still insist Covid is a hoax when they or a loved one are in intensive care. But the next best thing is verifiable information about your immediate community. It’s no accident that the rise of conspiracy thinking and post-truth has coincided with the decline of local news: 265 local titles have closed in the UK since 2005. Into that vacuum have rushed unverifiable, often abstract assertions about the state of the country or the world, spread by social media. With no full account of the reality around you to check against, those assertions can take root.The media is clearly central in all this. In the US, two separate epistemic universes now exist side by side – an MSNBC realm, in which Biden won fair and square; and a Fox News (and now Newsmax and One America News Network) one, in which Trump was robbed. In the US, it’s easy to succumb to nostalgia for the old “fairness doctrine” that demanded balance from the broadcast networks until it was scrapped under Ronald Reagan in 1987. If that were revived, and extended to cable, it might break down the divide, restoring at least a shared basis of agreed facts. Dream on, say the experts: that genie will not return to its bottle. Others suggest a more immediate fix: lobby advertisers to boycott fact-deniers such as Fox, starving them of funds.Still, cable news is only part of the story. Separate silos of knowledge exist and are entrenched just as much on Facebook and Twitter. A more realistic demand might be for external audits of those platforms, opening their algorithms in particular to public view, says the specialist in digital journalism Prof Emily Bell. Why not make transparent the process that ensures falsehoods spread six times faster than the truth on Twitter? While we’re at it, Bell suggests serious investment in the “civic infrastructure of knowledge”, from libraries to new forms of local reporting that might hold power to account.None of these ideas represents a perfect answer. The point is, the twin crises of Covid and Trump have exposed the mortal threat posed by lies and the long war on truth. Now the truth must defend itself – and fight back. More

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      US suffers bleak January as Covid rages and vaccination campaign falters

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      More Americans are dying of Covid-19 than at any time during the pandemic, the most complex mass vaccination campaign in history is off to a rocky start, and more transmissible strains of the coronavirus are emergent. January is going to be a bleak month.The most pessimistic outlook published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts up to 438,000 people may be killed by Covid-19 by the end of the month in a staggering upward trend.However, even in this bleak outlook, epidemiologists said there are still reasons for optimism, buoyed by the power of changing human behavior.“My hope is this month will be the peak and things will start to look better in February,” said Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University whose work focuses on pandemic response. “I don’t think it will be vaccination that will bend the curve. It will be washing your hands and staying home.”Predictions of a horrific death toll come from the CDC’s “ensemble” forecast, which takes in predictions from three dozen academic centers, all considering different criteria. Ensemble forecasts are known to be more accurate than single forecasts.It is this ensemble model which shows between 405,000 and 438,000 Americans may be killed by Covid-19 by the end of January. Predictions are made in four-week increments.Forecasting further into the future is considered unreliable, because the pandemic can change course so quickly. For example, majorities of Americans across the political spectrum are changing their behaviors to wear masks “every time” they leave the house, according to a recent tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.But growing discontent could undermine these improvements. In a counter example, some restaurants are breaking indoor dining bans in defiance of government regulations, arguing they cannot survive another lockdown. The CDC considers indoor dining “particularly high risk”.Further, a mass vaccination campaign now underway holds the promise of altering the pandemic, though it has stumbled. The vaccination campaign is not likely reflected in existing forecasts, because only about 3% of the population has been vaccinated.US officials had planned to vaccinate 20 million people before the end of 2020, a goal they have since walked back. To date, only about 9 million people have been vaccinated, representing about one-third of all vaccine doses distributed.Experts attribute this failure to a disengaged White House which pushed vaccine planning to states, a lack of timely federal funds, and failure to conduct public education campaigns to combat vaccine hesitancy. These failures have led to wide discrepancies between states.The differences are, “not a red versus blue state thing,” Dr Ashish K Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Twitter. “It’s a lack of federal leadership thing.”Again, we’ve turned pandemic response into state by state effortAnd we see large gaps in how states are doingThe Dakotas, West Virginia each vaccinated >5% of their populationAlabama, GA, MS each under 2%Not Red vs Blue state thingIts a lack of federal leadership thing— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) January 12, 2021
      Herd immunity, likely requiring near-universal vaccine uptake among US adults, is seen as the ultimate goal of the vaccination campaign. But a tipping point, when the vaccine has observable positive effect, is likely to come earlier. If the Biden-Harris administration can successfully speed up vaccinations, it is possible a reduction in deaths could be the first positive outcome of the vaccination campaign.“We will likely see the positive effects of the vaccination campaign in deaths before new cases,” said Rivers. That is because, “we are specifically targeting people who are at highest risk of severe illness” for vaccination.The Biden-Harris administration is also likely to have more vaccines at their disposal. Janssen Pharmaceuticals is expected to report clinical trial data at the end of January. That data could lead to emergency authorization.Further, a vaccine candidate developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University which is already in use in the UK is expected to report trial data in February. If it is favorable, that could bring two more vaccines online in the US.The emergence of new, highly transmissible Covid-19 variants is likely to strain these optimistic developments. The B117 variant discovered in the UK is thought to be up to 70% more transmissible, and has been in the US perhaps as early as October. That will require even greater adherence to social distancing measures.“It’s very early days in the US, but we should expect this to be the dominant variant in certain areas of the US (eg, CA) within the next 6-8 weeks (late February/early March),” said Professor Kristian G Andersen, a professor of immunology at Scripps Research Institute on Twitter.While there are 72 lab-confirmed cases of B117 in the US according to the CDC, the true prevalence is unknown. To find that out, the US would need to have a systematic genomic sequencing surveillance program. That is not happening. And B117 is not the only variant of concern.“I’m also quite worried about B1351,” said Rivers. “There is early evidence it is more transmissible [than dominant strains] and we’re looking for that one even less than B117,” she said.The future of Covid-19 outbreaks in the long-term is difficult to predict. The majority of scientists believe Covid-19 will not be eliminated – right now it is too widespread and transmissible. However, several factors could influence the severity of future outbreaks.That includes unknowns, such as whether infection by other coronaviruses confers immunity or partial immunity to Covid-19, the length of time vaccines protect people against the coronavirus, and seasonal variations of the virus.Those unknowns may require, “prolonged or intermittent social distancing … into 2022.” More

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      'We have to act now': Joe Biden presents $1.9tn coronavirus relief package – video

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      Joe Biden, the US president-elect, has unveiled a $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus package to tackle the virus and the economic crisis it has triggered.
      Vaccination and testing efforts in the US will be sustained with $160bn, a further $350bn will be issued for state and local government health programmes, and $1tn is to go families
      ‘No time to waste’: Biden unveils $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus package More