What the commentators said

So much for unity, said Nick Timothy in The Daily Telegraph. Biden and the Democrats may have pledged to govern by consensus, but the president spent his first week in office doing anything but. He signed a flurry of executive orders on left-wing causes like transgender rights, liberalised immigration laws and environmental matters – an oddly divisive agenda for one supposedly guided by unity. The problem, said Janan Ganesh in the FT, is that his campaign raised “impossible hopes”. If, as many in his party expect, he plans to be the most left-wing president since the 1960s (or even the 1930s), then he’ll “alienate Republicans and split the US. If, in keeping with his career so far, national togetherness is the higher dream, then he must forfeit or dilute much of his domestic programme.” Democrats are entitled to raise the prospect of unity or of radical reform – but they cannot reasonably expect to achieve both.

Much of Biden’s first year in office will be spent on domestic challenges, said Christopher Meyer in The Independent – not least the pandemic and fixing America’s battered economy. After that, though, he’s likely to turn his gaze abroad, where he’ll seek to restore ties with allies, return to multilateralism and global organisations, and take a tough stance on Russia and China. And things could get awkward where Britain is concerned, said Jon Allsop in Foreign Policy. Biden once referred to Boris Johnson as Trump’s “physical and emotional clone”, and was opposed to Brexit. Many Democrats still recall Johnson’s jibe in 2016 that Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike” for Winston Churchill because he is “part-Kenyan”. But there’s still scope for cooperation, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. The UK and the US share plenty of common ground on issues like climate change and trade, and the PM was one of the first foreign leaders Biden called after taking office. The fact is that “Biden is an intensely pragmatic politician”: you can bet that he’ll want to forge a good relationship with America’s closest ally.