Biden’s Task

President Joe Biden has inherited not just a pandemic but a broken American political culture, John Dickerson writes for The Atlantic—and his task will be to transition the US back to reality, or at least back to forging consensus based on it.

In fact, if Biden succeeds, his presidency will be downright boring, Dickerson argues, quoting former White House Chief of Staff, Defense Secretary, and CIA Director Leon Panetta as saying that a “rational, experienced president” will be just that. Dickerson continues: “Such a presidency would return the executive branch to its role of informing the public,” a departure from former President Donald Trump’s scattered, disinformative Covid-19 press conferences. “Briefings, charts, and a parade of forgettable public officials can explain to the citizens of the country … what is being done in their name. America showed a distinct preference for this approach during the pandemic. … No presidency will be free of political interest or confirmation bias, but a presidency that puts persuasion over assertion, facts over piffle, has a chance to achieve real successes.”

It’s not that Biden won’t have anything to do, Dickerson writes—it’s that his to-do list is so long that “boring” is the only way.

As for specific actions, Biden got to work quickly: He has already signed a series of executive actions to undo much of Trump’s legacy, from lifting his travel ban on a handful of Muslim-majority countries to canceling construction of Trump’s US–Mexico border wall, as CNN’s Eric Bradner, Betsy Klein, and Christopher Hickey report.

Why Biden Needs Global Consensus

On the topic of President Biden’s to-do list, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes for The Guardian that it’s both expansive and urgent. “Given the intertwined triple threats of the pandemic, economic collapse and climate catastrophe,” Brown writes, “his presidency will be defined not by the previous benchmarks of 100 days, but rather by its first 10 or 20 days.”

Importantly, those challenges all demand global cooperation, Brown writes, suggesting Biden move quickly not only to rejoin the Paris climate accords but to work through bodies like the G20 to coordinate economic stimulus and pool funding for vaccinations.

Worst President Ever?

Was Donald Trump the worst president in American history? Hands down, CNN Presidential Historian Tim Naftali writes for The Atlantic, ranking Trump below the presidents—Warren Harding, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson—typically seen as occupying the bottom rungs.

“For decades in the 20th century,” Harding ranked as the consensus worst, Naftali writes; the Teapot Dome affair over oil-leasing rights—which saw one Cabinet member jailed and preceded “Watergate” as “shorthand for a terrible presidential scandal”—wasn’t even the only corruption drama to ensnare top Harding officials. Pierce and Buchanan “abetted and at times amplified the forces that drove” the US into the Civil War, while Johnson, an “unrepentant white supremacist,” scuttled Reconstruction and sabotaged Black civil and voting rights for a century.

But Trump, Naftali writes, violated both parts of his oath of office: to faithfully execute it and to defend the Constitution. Trump’s failure rests on three “pillars”: He “subordinate[d] national-security interests to his political needs,” oversaw a thoroughly incompetent response to Covid-19 (while actively discouraging safety measures), and fomented a siege on the Capitol by promulgating a stolen-election conspiracy theory. In that final act, Naftali writes, Trump betrayed the Constitution like no president before.

What the US Handover Means for Europe

It’s possible that no one is more relieved, currently, than European diplomats and heads of state. (Though they mostly stayed quiet through four years of President Trump’s reported berating, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas put it bluntly after President Biden’s election win, telling Der Spiegel in December that “[w]e have waited a long time for this,” when asked specifically about the prospect of working with Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken.)

At Carnegie Europe, Rosa Balfour writes that “on issues from technology to relations with China, divergent world views and interests will hamper attempts to find common ground between Europe and America,” Balfour writes. “But navigating these complexities with the United States after four years of loneliness must be the EU’s priority.” To that end, Balfour writes, “the EU needs to make itself an attractive partner” by shedding stodgy summitry in favor of nimbler negotiating formats and by being open to compromises that cut across multiple policy areas.

Indonesia’s Massive, Young-First Vaccination Effort

While the US and other countries vaccinate the elderly first, along with front-line health workers, “Indonesia is taking the opposite view” and plans to prioritize the young, Times of London Asia Editor Richard Lloyd Parry reported earlier this month, “on the basis that younger people, being more active and mobile, are most likely to contract and spread the virus to vulnerable age groups.”

Indonesia has a young population and lacks data showing the vaccine it intends to use, produced by Chinese company Sinovac, is safe for the elderly and pregnant women, Arys Aditya and Yudith Ho noted at Bloomberg; The Washington Post’s Siobhán O’Grady points out that many in Indonesia live in intergenerational households, which could enhance the value of a spread-stopping strategy. Front-line health workers, like elsewhere, will be at the front of Indonesia’s line.

The country’s vaccination drive, one of the world’s largest, is now getting underway. It will test not only Indonesia’s prioritization strategy but the Sinovac vaccine: At NPR, Maria Godoy reports that trials have yielded widely varying estimates of its effectiveness.