Biden has his work cut out for him
The pandemic comes first, then addressing the damage from Trump’s presidency
Under unprecedented circumstances, and amid the worst pandemic in a century, Americans voted in record numbers and delivered a clear result: On Jan. 20, 2021, Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States.
Biden will take office with a mandate to address a range of urgent issues. He will need to quickly work to bring the pandemic that is ravaging our nation under control, and restore the country’s struggling economy, ensuring shared prosperity and growth. He will have to ensure that every American has affordable healthcare, confront systemic racism and attack climate change. And he will have to contend with the damage from Donald Trump’s presidency, which is vast and only likely to grow over the next two months.
No one is better suited to these tasks than Joe Biden. His decency, calm and strength will be the antidote that Americans need after four years of division, misinformation and chaos.
Biden has made it clear that while he ran as a Democratic candidate, he’ll govern as an American president. This is something Trump never understood. Representing all Americans is essential for all presidents, but it will be all the more important as we confront the raging pandemic. And no matter how the runoff elections in January turn out, and which party may
Tcontrol the Senate, we must all do our part to facilitate the national healing.
The first priority must be quickly gaining control of the pandemic, getting relief to workers, families and small businesses and getting the U.S. economy back on track. Currently, the virus is infecting more than 100,000 Americans every day and killing about a thousand. We must provide more testing and contact tracing and continue to seek new treatments. And we must provide a clear and sciencebased message to Americans about the importance of masks, social distancing and more.
In order to fight the virus and the economic destruction it uesday’s election made clear, once again, how politically divided we are as a nation. But there’s at least one thing Americans agree on across the political gulf: They don’t trust the news media.
A recent Gallup poll in conjunction with the Knight Foundation found that, although 84% of Americans agree the news media are crucial to the survival of democracy, two-thirds worry about it being biased. It’s our job as Americans to be skeptical of information attempting to manipulate us. Yet lately, distrust in the news is more than healthy skepticism: It’s outright hostility.
Some of this lack of trust can be laid at the feet of the Trump administration, which waged a relentless four-year campaign to undermine public confidence in media reports critical of the president. But some of the blame falls on the media, both on the left and right.
Each year since 1975, Americans’ trust in news sources has eroded further, and a new Pew Research Center poll reveals that Americans’ confidence in the news media is well below that in education, medicine, science and the military.
Numerous studies have found Fox News to be among the most biased and least accurate of popular news sources. Not only did its blatant cheerleading for President Trump severely undermine the network’s credibility as “fair and balanced,” studies have found that its viewers reject established science on issues such as climate change and are generally less informed than even people who watch no news at all. Yet, the network was the most watched over the summer and remains the most trusted news source by 65% of Republicans and those who lean toward that party.
The heavy reliance of Republicans on Fox made me pay more attention to the network in the run-up to the election. What I found most disturbing was the complete blurring of news and opinion.
An online news story from Fox News on Oct. 4 demonstrated one of the most common problems. The article was titled “Tucker: Biden used ‘illusion of reasonableness’ at debate to disguise plans to ‘tear down our system.’ ” There was nothing to indicate this article was opinion. Rather, it was cast as a news report, but the report was about what the highly opinionated Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson had to say about the first presidential debate. It quoted Carlson as saying that during the debate “Biden all but admitted onstage that he plans to tear down our system” while “nothing Trump said onstage was radical.”
The story was one of many on the website reporting on what one of its highly opinionated commentators had to say, as if that were actual news. Other stories deliberately distort the news to mollify their audience, which seems to lack the ability to apply critical thinking. In a country that depends on truth in reporting, this is akin to undermining democracy.
Fox News is in the bias confirmation business, and its success can be seen in the last four years of rising skepticism, especially among conservatives, on a range of issues, including COVID-19 risks, vaccine efficacy and the need for climate mitigation. The raising of doubts about proven facts — an effort embraced by Trump — is like the iceberg ripping into the hull of the Titanic, letting the icy water of irrationality and “gut feelings” pull us under.
And Fox isn’t alone in abandoning the straightforward reporting of facts. Take this Oct. 8 article from the Washington Post: “Isolated in the White wrought, we will need to get longoverdue assistance to states and cities on the front lines of the pandemic, accelerate the production of protective gear for hospitals and essential workers, and ensure the states are prepared to rapidly deploy a vaccine when one has been thoroughly vetted and approved.
None of this should be partisan. We must all acknowledge that there cannot be a full economic recovery until we get the virus under control. There is no choice to be made between fighting the pandemic and improving the economy. They go hand in hand.
As president, Biden will have some new challenges to face, too. The Supreme Court is about to hear a request by Trump to strike down the Affordable Care Act, immediately putting at risk access to healthcare for 20 million Americans and jeopardizing the care of hundreds of millions more with preexisting conditions. This would be bad policy during the best of times, and it would move the country in the worst possible direction during a public health crisis like this one. We must urge our Republican colleagues to reconsider — they have never put forward an alternate health plan, and to eliminate the one we have without something better would be unconscionable.
And while these are the most urgent priorities, we cannot turn the page on the painful chapter of Trump’s presidency without taking meaningful action to address the damage he did to the norms of our democracy, and to our democratic institutions. Even now, having lost the presidential race, Trump seems determined to pull down the house around him on the way out, making spurious claims of fraud and all but rejecting a peaceful transition of power. We will have significant work to do to restore the health of our democracy, let alone our standing around the world.
With a Democratic president, Republican interest in oversight and checks and balances will hopefully be resuscitated. The House should prioritize passing legislation to protect our democracy, including a bill I introduced to expedite enforcement of congressional subpoenas, protect the independence of the Justice Department, safeguard whistleblowers and inspectors general, stiffen penalties under the Hatch Act, and provide for effective enforcement of the emoluments clause. Passing these reforms should not be a political win for either party, but a victory for our democracy and Constitution — and an opening for Republicans to return from the wilderness of antidemocratic Trumpism.
Although the nation has rejected another four years of Donald Trump, many of the forces that propelled his rise will remain long after he is gone, including a globalized economy, automation that has cost millions their jobs and a social media environment in which lies and hate travel far faster than truth or love.
In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, and I’m confident Biden would agree, that “we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”
It will take all of us working together to address the challenges facing the country. And if we don’t set aside the personal attacks, the scourge of xenophobic populism will continue to plague us. America is a resilient nation, and we have overcome much greater difficulties in the past. We will do so again.