Is Biden really as good as his word?

The 46th president’s first full week in power is drawing to a close, and we’re getting more of a sense of where his priorities lie, writes Holly Baxter

Biden signs an executive order on climate change on Wednesday (AP)

As we come to the end of the first full week of the Biden presidency, most reporters here in the US are breathing a sigh of relief. After spending four years in a state of constant trepidation, the relative calm of an administration doing everything as it’s expected to is strange. 

As Biden unpicks the complicated threads of a Trump legacy – rolling back the Muslim ban, stopping work on the infamous border wall, promising to reunite children separated from their parents while claiming asylum with their families, implementing a mask mandate to try and halt the spread of Covid-19, revoking the transgender ban in the military – we are trying to get a feel for what his own priorities might be beyond “bringing back unity” after such divisiveness. 

What will be the 46th president’s own Obamacare or big, beautiful wall? What will he be famous for long after we’ve moved on to a President Kamala Harris, a President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or even – perish the thought – a President Tucker Carlson?

There are small clues here and there. If I had to put my money on one thing, it would be environmental policy. Green energy is a passion of Biden’s, especially in terms of modernising the American economy. While he was not swayed by the Green New Deal favored by the likes of Bernie Sanders and “The Squad”, it seems he was convinced by the more capitalism-friendly arguments of fellow Democratic presidential contenders like Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang. 

Steyer, a billionaire hedge fund operator with a penchant for liberal politics, was reported to have met with Biden officials not long before the election. His business-minded ideas for environmental justice are certainly compelling – and he elaborated on them for our Voices section recently. 

Like Biden, Steyer favours working across the aisle to achieve something workable for an economy recovering from the pandemic. I’d be surprised if he didn’t end up in some kind of advisory role to the US’s new government.

Black Lives Matter was, of course, the rallying call of 2020, and research shows that people of colour in America are disproportionately affected by climate change. The failure to adequately prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation by George W Bush was a scandal because the vast majority of those affected were Black. 

A picture of Bush staring out the window of Air Force One from far above did massive damage to his reputation. “Teflon Don” had his own, similar moment when he threw paper towels at hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico in 2017. That controversy didn’t stick as much as Katrina stuck to Bush, but that’s mainly because the Trump presidency threw up scandals with such regularity that it’s often hard to pinpoint one. He even managed more than one impeachment, after all.

By making climate change a central concern of his administration, Biden can address concerns about business growth and the economy after Covid while at the same time staying true to his promises about working for racial justice. He spent a long time reaching out to Black voters during his campaign and, with the help of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, managed to flip states and counties Democrats hadn’t taken in years. That helped hand him the presidency – and voters won’t forget it.

In a first show of priorities, President Biden made sure the US rejoined the Paris Agreement and cancelled the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on his very first day. This Wednesday, he said, “today is climate day at the White House, which means today is jobs day at the White House”, while signing a slew of executive orders that brought back environmental standards and promised a “jobs revolution”. 

Will such policy moves have a real effect on what’s happening on the ground in places like Flint, Michigan, where the mostly Black population still doesn’t have access to clean drinking water? That’s what we’ll be watching for over the next few weeks, parsing out the rhetoric from the action and seeking a better view of whether President Joseph Robinette Biden is better at keeping his word than Donald John Trump.

Yours,

Holly Baxter

Opinion editor (US)