In his first words as president, Joe Biden offered a parable of courage, leveraging the resilience forged by the disdain for the “uncivil war” of modern politics in a rallying cry to a disheartened and divided people.
Only two weeks ago, the platform on which Biden delivered his inaugural speech was stormed by a pro-Trump crowd on their way to insurrection. The memories of this outrage added strength to the new president’s comment that “at this hour, democracy has prevailed.”
Biden did not mention Trump. The former president was invisible behind the walls of his Florida resort as his tumultuous term expired. But by praising the survival of American democracy and condemning the “shouts,” “exhausting outrage,” a “state of chaos,” and politics as a “raging fire destroying everything in its path,” Biden clearly sought to turn the page on the discord of the Trump years.
He also conspicuously rejected the lies that, in the former president’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat, threatened the country’s democratic structures themselves. “We must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even fabricated,” Biden said.
Despite the warning of a “perilous winter,” Biden’s inaugural speech was a rare moment of hope and inspiration nearly a year after the country’s battle against a virus that ended normal life for everyone and fractured the community as well as families. In a poignant interlude in his inaugural address, silence fell over the Capitol and the National Mall as Biden paused to lead Americans in a moment of silent prayer, to honor the over 400,000 fellow citizens who died from Covid-19.
Under the marble gaze of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, who took office at a time when America was more divided than it is today, lines of lights stretched like tombstones toward the Washington Monument.
