A new presidential mandate begins at the White House

Democrat Joe Biden succeeds the outgoing US president Donald Trump

Corina Cristea, 22.01.2021, 13:41

Against the background of special
security measures, the US outgoing president, Republican Donald Trump, has
ended his mandate in Washington and has been succeeded by Democrat Joe Biden,
who pledges that during his administration America will again be ready to
assume the role of a world leader.

Pundits believe the new president
will have to focus on the internal affairs as millions of Americans have been
convinced by the outgoing president that the latest election was rigged.
Although never proved, this allegation, repeatedly made by the one whose
administration was characterized by a series of controversial statements and
decisions, was the main cause for the violent events of January 6th,
when five people were killed.

The riot, which took place at the
very heart of the world’s democracy, at the United States Congress, stirred
heated debates. In the wake of the Capitol riot the editor-in-chief of Radio
France Internationale Romania, Ovidiu Nahoi, told Radio Romania that ‘Donald
Trump pledged to make America great again, but instead he has been making it
smaller and smaller’. But what is the outcome of the aforementioned events and
what we should expect from now on?

Ovidiu Nahoi: First
and foremost the new administration will need more time to reconcile America
with itself – a very divided society. And America will not have the energy and
time to get involved in major global issues, where the American values are
needed. It will not have the time and the energy to get involved in these
issues because America will get busy with domestic problems for a year or two, needing
half of president Biden’s mandate to say the least, to heal these internal
wounds and reconcile with itself. So the country’s influence at global level is
going to shrink, that America, president Trump pledged to make great. And that
influence and power started to wane right during the mandate of the outgoing
president. So, that means a less powerful America whose commitment to getting
involved in the world’s major issues has diminished.

According to Kenneth Roth, director
of New York-based Human Rights Watch, President Biden must restore his
country’s credibility on human rights at home and abroad, after what he said
were four years of abuse of democratic principles. Speaking to Reuters before
the release of the activist group’s annual report, Kenneth Roth said that outgoing
president Donald Trump had flouted human rights at home and been inconsistent
in criticizing other countries’ rights records. The outgoing president denied
responsibility for the Capitol riot as well as the allegations on human rights
abuse saying that the election was rigged to block two of his strategies known
as ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘America First’.

The House of Representatives has
accused Donald Trump of encouraging violence with his false claims of election
fraud, thus becoming the first president in US history to be impeached twice. Roth
has also called for Biden to re-engage with the United Nations’ Human Rights
Council, a Geneva forum which Trump quit in June 2018.

Focusing on several types of crisis -
epidemiological, economic, climate or racial – several decisions of the new
White House leader have been made and announced beforehand by the new
administration in the first days of its mandate aimed at cancelling some of
Trump’s most controversial policies. These policies run on a wide spectrum ranging
from denying some Muslim citizens access to the USA to the country’s withdrawal
from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Before his investiture Biden had
presented a 1.9 trillion economic rescue package aimed at boosting the economy
and stepping up the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Besides economic and health issues,
the new US president must deal with the country’s society gaps, pundits believe.
According to professor Iulian Chifu, director of the Centre for Conflict
Prevention, social cohesion in the US is at an all-time low, although we are
speaking about a state, which along its history has seen slavery, segregation
and racism.

Iulian Chifu: We are in the situation when these gaps have to be bridged, social cohesion must be
restored while citizens must regain their confidence in institutions,
democracy, justice and this can be done not only through political moves but
through social surveys on the deeply-rooted causes of these gaps, by avoiding
extremes – including from the other viewpoint of progressivism and the far-left
– taking action while using a set of very important psychological instruments,
at the same time providing support to all those who have been alienated by the
excessive use of technology and by being kept away from the real society and
public debates.

The beauty of democracy, the force of
the democratic system resides in the ability to recompose itself, to relaunch
itself and heal its own wounds, professor Chifu went on to say.

(bill)