Biden and Harris face a mountain of threats that would vex anyone
Now comes the laborious half.
President Joe Biden involves energy at a time when the United States faces extra challenges, and extra threats, than maybe at any time in its historical past.
Is this hyperbole? Abraham Lincoln had the Civil War, a large rebellion that took 750,000 lives in 4 years. In 2021 phrases, that’s 11 million individuals. Obviously nothing can examine with that. Yet Lincoln didn’t face, on the identical time, an expansionist China, Russian cyber hacking, Iranian crazies, or an erratic North Korea that says it has missiles that threaten the continental United States.
Nor did Lincoln should take care of local weather change. And that outrageous picture of that traitor waving a Confederate flag within the Capitol in the course of the Jan. 6 insurrection? That by no means occurred in the course of the Civil War.
Economic catastrophe dealing with Biden
Is it hyperbole to match what Biden has inherited with what confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933? The Great Depression was effectively underway, unemployment hit 24.9%, and tens of hundreds of thousands of Americans misplaced their properties. “Brother can you spare a dime?” requested one standard track. Few may. The official unemployment at present — 6.7% — isn’t wherever close to that. But that is misleading. A broader Labor Department measure of unemployment, which some economists say higher displays the true well being of the U.S. labor pressure is 11.7%. Not fairly 1933, Still, here is another sobering knowledge:
► 2020 was the worst year for job losses since 1939.
► Food insecurity threatens some 50 million Americans, together with a potential 17 million kids.
Americans who’re hungry and/or jobless? This weakens us and crimps our future, and thus is a nationwide safety risk. I may present a lot extra examples right here, however you get the purpose.
And the threats that would rear their ugly heads later within the Thirties — Nazi Germany and Japan — weren’t on FDR’s radar when he was sworn in. Cyber assaults? Hypersonic missiles? Climate change? No, no, and no. “The only thing we have to fear,” our thirty second president famously said in his first inaugural address, “is fear itself.” Perhaps.
In Roosevelt’s time — almost a century in the past — two nice oceans protected us from invasion. This definitely isn’t the case now. Sept. 11 confirmed that to be the case 20 years in the past, and fears of a “cyber 9/11” preserve U.S. safety planners awake at night time now. Our electrical grid, communication and monetary networks and extra, all are mentioned to be susceptible in methods that most Americans can not start to fathom.
Biden and COVID:What is the most important step Joe Biden can immediately take to address COVID?
Complicating all of this for our forty sixth president is a broad swath of the general public that has been so totally brainwashed and deluded, that they really imagine the crackpot conspiracy theories that our former president spent years spreading, and which senior leaders in his personal occasion eagerly repeated. Repeating them as effectively have been assorted school dropouts masquerading as oracles on fact-free cable channels and the radio airwaves. The injury they’ve completed is incalculable.
Trying to heal deep injury
Biden has mentioned he needs to be a healer and uniter. That’s a great sentiment. But many Americans — we noticed some on Jan. 6 — are probably past redemption. They are cop killers and insurrectionists. In his second Inaugural tackle in 1865, Lincoln spoke of the need “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” however this burst of eloquence got here after 4 years of warfare that dealt vengeance to such traitors.
Capitol riots:Joe Biden, don’t repeat Abe Lincoln’s mistake
And I haven’t even talked about the risk that is entrance and heart for Biden: the COVID-19 pandemic. It is worse than ever. On Tuesday, Inauguration eve, the U.S. death toll passed 400,000, in line with Johns Hopkins University. Incoming White House Chief of Staff Ron Klein said on CNN over the weekend that one other 100,000 Americans may perish within the subsequent few weeks, lifting the demise toll over half-a-million.
The president has vowed 100 million vaccinations in 100 days. We should hope he succeeds. We should hope he additionally succeeds at managing all the opposite risks we face: Overseas, homegrown, man-made — unprecedented in scope and selection.
Paul Brandus is the founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. His newest guide is “Jackie: Her Transformation from First Lady to Jackie O.” Follow him on Twitter: @WestWingReport
