Joe Biden’s in-tray is already overflowing

By James Astill Washington bureau chief and Lexington columnist, The Economist

THE YEAR ahead in America will be a big improvement on its awful predecessor. The country was wracked by such a series of scandals and disasters in 2020 that, by the time voters limped to the polls, Donald Trump’s impeachment trial ten months earlier barely warranted a mention. A quarter of a million Americans were dead of covid-19. Over 10m jobs had been lost. The racial grievances highlighted by the Black Lives Matter protests—some of the biggest in American history—had been inflamed by the president’s race-baiting on the trail. Mr Trump’s refusal to accept the election result then put even the country’s democracy in doubt.

Many of those problems will carry over into 2021. The economy will be shaky as long as the virus remains rampant. The mistrust of the electoral process that Mr Trump has encouraged among his supporters will be long-lasting. Yet the simple fact of his ejection from the White House—after he became the fourth president in a century to fail to win a second term—has transformed America’s prospects of managing its troubles. Mr Trump saw covid-19 as a communications problem to be spun into irrelevance. He saw America’s racial divisions as a political opportunity. In Joe Biden, America will have a competent president who respects expertise and is committed to bringing people together.

Mr Biden will signal this in an opening flurry of executive actions. He will cancel America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, rejoin the Paris climate agreement and reinstate the Obama administration’s protections for illegal immigrants brought to America as children. He will scrap Mr Trump’s ban on travellers from some majority-Muslim countries. Mr Biden will end his predecessor’s policy of separating illegal child migrants from their parents and launch a mission to find the missing parents of 545 migrant children in custody. He will issue a national mask mandate.

His administration will also take rapid steps to rebuild America’s Trump-bruised institutions. It will restore credible scientists to the Environmental Protection Agency and reintroduce firewalls to protect the independence of the Department of Justice. Mr Biden’s secretary of state will need to restore confidence and order to America’s much-abused diplomatic corps as much as to its alliances.

These measures will have added significance because of the Democrats’ failure to capture the Senate in November. They are unlikely to correct that by winning the two Senate run-off elections due to be held in Georgia in early January. That means Mr Biden will be unable to pass almost any of the economic, health-care, climate and tax policies he promised on the trail. One of his first priorities had been to pass an expansive $2trn economic stimulus package, including investments in green and other infrastructure. Getting a much skinnier stimulus package past Mitch McConnell, the veteran Republican Senate leader, will be a struggle.

Mr McConnell will try to deny the Biden administration any wins and re-establish his party’s reputation for fiscal conservatism (a dogma that only seems to concern its lawmakers in opposition), with a view to making gains in the mid-term elections in 2022. Blocked on Capitol Hill, Mr Biden will have to take more ambitious executive actions to make progress at home, as did the Obama administrations in which he previously served. Expect him to institute further curbs on pollution from coal- and gas-fired power stations—though whether such measures will survive the scrutiny of an increasingly activist conservative majority on the Supreme Court bench is unclear.

In foreign affairs, the new administration will represent a dramatic change in tone from its predecessor—and more continuity than many expect. Mr Biden will soothe America’s traditional allies and restore American leadership to the multinational efforts to contain climate change, Russian aggression and Iran’s nuclear programme (see article). But he will maintain the Trump administration’s adversarial posture towards China, and some of its tariffs. He will slow, but not reverse, America’s disengagement from Afghanistan. And in America’s accelerating shift in focus from west to east—which Mr Biden will not interrupt—those same old allies may detect more than a hint of Mr Trump’s transactional style.

Despite the constraints on his power, 2021 could turn out well for Mr Biden. This will rest above all on his administration’s ability to make a covid-19 vaccine quickly and widely available. If that goes smoothly, the economy will rapidly make up its lost ground and Mr Biden’s popularity will surge. If it does not, the hope stirred by the end of Mr Trump’s misrule will soon dissipate—to the former president’s advantage.

The degree to which Mr Trump retreats from public life is another great question for the year ahead. Members of the Republican establishment fear that, by looming over their defeated party on Twitter and television, Mr Trump will be a barrier to reforming it. Their fears will probably be realised.

James Astill: Washington bureau chief and Lexington columnist, The Economist■

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition of The World in 2021 under the headline “The president’s priorities”