Capitol Hill assault will complicate Joe Biden’s presidency

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The chaos on Capitol Hill Wednesday gave shape to two presidencies. It besmirched one of them and it complicated the other.

The rioting and rampaging – the coda to the presidency of Donald Trump, the prelude to the presidency of Joe Biden – transformed an unsettling transfer of power into an unprecedented one.

Mr. Biden is to take office Jan. 20 at the very site where some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, incited by the President himself, rampaged through the marble halls of the Capitol, ransacked offices, destroyed property, threatened the safety of lawmakers and destroyed the sense of sober purpose of the Electoral College vote tally that they disrupted by their fury.

For months, Mr. Biden has spoken of his presidency as one of healing, promising to govern on behalf of those who opposed him as well as those who supported him. That would never be easy. Now that task – now his presidency itself – is substantially harder.

“This is a very difficult problem for Biden,” said Daniel M. Shea, a Colby College political scientist. “We are in an era when each side views the other as the enemy, when each side thinks the other is a danger to the country, when there is no trust whatsoever. There is a crisis of trust coursing throughout the political system.”

Rarely do presidential transitions proceed without cultural or political disruptions. Abraham Lincoln took office after James Buchanan failed to avert the Civil War. Warren G. Harding became president speaking of near-isolationist “normalcy” after Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. Franklin Roosevelt preached governmental activism after Herbert Hoover’s laissez-faire policies failed to ease the Great Depression.

But this year’s transition between two men born in the 1940s is especially difficult, raising several questions for Mr. Biden:

Does his familiar “unity” theme strike the right tone at this juncture, or should he instead stress a “purpose” theme? How should he approach his partisan rivals in a legislative body he occupied for 36 years – as their friend, the way Harry Truman did, or as their conquistador, as Lyndon Johnson did?

Is a strong Biden administration push for vigorous prosecution of trespassers and fomenters of violence an apt bow to the notion of the rule of law – or would it further inflame the Trump supporters, permitting them to argue that the Biden team wants to make them political prisoners?

In remarks Thursday in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden signalled he was inclined toward harsh penalties, arguing that those who rushed the Capitol were not protesters but instead “a riotous mob – insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.”

The only possible bright spot: Lawmakers of both parties were hustled out of the House and Senate chambers and into secure locations. There they sat, one beside the other, together in peril and outrage. In wartime Britain, the shared London Tube experience of the Blitz forged national unity and wore down if not wore away class differences. Could this be a parallel, ultimately positive, experience?

“Some Republicans finally are coming over to see the danger that Trump presents,’' Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, a decorated Marine officer who was engaged in hostile action in four tours of duty in Iraq, said in an interview. “I’m not sure healing is going to be very easy. These are the biggest divisions we have had in modern times. I wonder whether one presidential term is enough to accomplish that.”

In less than two weeks, Mr. Biden is to be inaugurated. It was never going to be a graceful transfer of power; now it will be even more fraught. Historians still speak with disdain over how Dwight Eisenhower refused in 1953 to accept Truman’s invitation to have coffee in the White House before riding together to the Capitol for the Eisenhower inauguration. The general wondered out loud “if I can stand sitting next to that guy.”

That is nothing compared with the transition that the President was forced into acknowledging this week.

Four years ago, Mr. Trump used the occasion of his inauguration to deplore what he called “American carnage” and vowed that it “stops right here and it stops now” – a locution that befuddled many Americans and prompted former president George W. Bush to characterize the rhetoric as “weird.”

And yet the American carnage that will surely be the greatest historical legacy of the Trump years occurred “right here,” on the grounds of the Capitol where Mr. Biden will take his oath of office and begin a presidential term in challenging circumstances.

Often, presidents use their inaugural addresses to set a tone for their administrations. Roosevelt did so in 1933 when he deplored “fear itself,’' and John F. Kennedy did so in 1961 when he urged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you.” In 1977, Jimmy Carter used the occasion to thank his predecessor, Gerald Ford, for his post-Watergate presidency and for “all he has done to heal our land” – a phrase that Mr. Biden is sure not to repeat.

Incoming presidents and speech writers often scour previous inaugural addresses for phrases and images that capture the moment. Often, they land on Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural, when he declared, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” a phrase intended to soften the partisan edges in the young country but one that would hit the wrong tone 220 years later.

Perhaps Mr. Biden instead will take inspiration from the 1861 words of the embattled newly inaugurated Lincoln, after seven states seceded from the Union, rebels created the Confederate States of America, and state militia seized federal forts in the South. In that moment, with divisions among Americans raw and dangerous, he said:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

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