This is a day I have looked forward to for four very long years. I woke up at 5 AM this morning and in the opposite of my normal morning routine got up very quickly. Today was the end of one of the darkest chapters in American history. And the hopeful beginning of a new and better one.
Bradley Burston, one of my favorite Israeli writers summed up the trash we were taking out this morning:
Early on in his presidency, many of us Americans feared that Donald Trump would turn out to be Hitler. Our fears were misplaced. We should have been terrified that he would turn out to be Donald Trump.
Back then, I remember hoping that he might, as some of his more reluctant voters indicated, grow into his majestic office, take on its knowledge with its power. Perhaps, as one supporter put it, “When you get to know him, you’ll see the man he really is.” Well, we got to know him. We’ve seen the man he really is. Donald Trump is the worst man in America. Thank God he’s gone.
Tom Nichols summed up the joy so many of us are feeling this evening:
It was with real joy that we saw him depart this morning. As he did so the words of Leopold Amery rang in my ears – with the same veracity he spoke them to Chamberlin in 1940:
“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
I will not shade it – there was real joy and relief in my heart when Biden’s hand came off the Bible and he was now the 46th President of the United States. The last two months had made me very, very, pessimistic that we would get to this day.
But arrive on this day we did – and all I can say is, it is so nice to hear someone speak like a President should speak – instead of as an authoritarian thug.
I thought Biden gave a great speech, hitting the right tone of conciliation underpinned by just the right note of steel underneath. To quote Charles Pierce: “There was an unmistakable toughness beneath the warm evocations of our common citizenship.“
Charles Pierce again sums up the feelings of the day – relief and justified concern:
So, yes, it was a day of relief. (Mike Pence looked like a guy on the first day of his parole.) So, yes, it was a day of celebration. But it also was a day of solemn commemoration of all we’ve lost, and of all that we came so perilously close to losing, in what, in retrospect, seems like a slow-rolling attempt at national suicide.
And President Biden got right to work:
Thanks be to God!
