It will take a while to get used to a presidency that does not sail from crisis to crisis and does not take up all the space in the media environment.
Those who have only been following American policy for four or five years must begin to wonder what is going on.
What is the president doing? Why don’t we hear about it all the time? What happened to the circus that garnered attention day and night?
In fact, the new president has been very active since his arrival, but the functioning of the White House has simply returned to its normal course.
No more insomnia waiting for the next one tweet. No more presidential speeches crammed with insults, lies and ranting.
The president’s spokesperson now meets with the press on a daily basis to provide factual information and to answer questions without evasions, unlike her predecessors, who were silent for months or served a mixture of tasteless pablum and shameless lies.
The COVID team’s press conferences are of the same order, as politicians no longer perform live there and make way for scientists, who are now free to let science speak.
Intense activity
All this does not mean that the Biden team remains passive. Rather, it is ramping up executive action, many of which overturn Trump’s most controversial executive orders, and its orderly work of reconstruction contrasts with the chaos of the previous administration.
Whether it’s reinstating the Paris climate agreement, fighting discrimination, restoring ethics among executive employees, or seriously tackling COVID-19, the Biden Administration is not idle. not.
In addition to the executive orders, Biden must ensure he gets the most out of Congress. As he does not have the 60 senators required to overcome the filibuster, it will have to choose carefully the laws which deserve the exceptional procedure of budgetary reconciliation, available once a year.
If Biden seems discreet in public, it is because he spends an enormous amount of time negotiating with his former colleagues in the Senate, knowing full well that nothing can advance in Washington without compromise between the parties.
Finally quiet
That’s a change from Trump, who excelled at spurring conflict and monopolizing all attention on himself.
His departure from Washington and his eclipse from social media make it harder for columnists, who never lacked content in the face of Trump’s scandals and lies. But the circus is not entirely over. The impeachment trial is coming and the civil war between Republicans will last as long as the party does not get rid of the Trumpist mortgage.
Donald Trump has long made fun of “Sleepy Joe” Biden. Yet even if Biden doesn’t constantly monopolize attention and his presidency is less hectic than that of his predecessor, we can finally sleep easy.
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