Inside OutBiden’s first 100 days were a triumph, but the spectre of Trumpism hovers

As President Joe Biden addressed the houses of the US Congress last week in the relaxed, folksy tones of a cherished grandfather, his team, and US pollsters at large, were in agreement that in his first 100 days, he could not have hoped for better.

After four years of Twitter-fuelled unpredictability, stress, churn and dysfunction – capped by Donald Trump’s unbelievable mismanagement of the United States’ awful pandemic crisis – the return to reasonableness, competence and comparative calm is palpable and welcomed by a significant majority of Americans. So is his “blue-collar blueprint” for America.

Pew Research Centre put Biden’s overall approval rating at 59 per cent – on a par with George H.W Bush at 58 per cent and Barack Obama at 61 per cent, and leaving Trump in the dust (39 per cent). Republican warnings of foot-in-mouth mistakes and a new president in “cognitive decline” have not materialised. Nor has the “woke” extremism that Republicans predicted from radical new leftist Democrats.

The sense is that the pandemic is now under control, the vaccine roll-out is humming along, and the US$1,400 Covid-19 recovery cheques are doing their work. The economy is reviving, creating more than a million new jobs, and there is rising optimism that a summer of relative normalcy lies ahead.

Ambitious plans to rebuild the country’s embarrassingly creaky infrastructure have been welcomed, as have the social welfare reforms at the heart of the US$1.8 trillion American Families Plan. The arguments and controversies over how to pay for these plans have yet to come. In short, Biden can claim a virtually unblemished 100-day scorecard.

So much has so far gone right, but there is a nervous recognition that much in America remains wrong, and cannot easily be made right. The national trauma of the January 6 extremist assault on the Capitol has crystallised the reality of deep racial and social divisions in US society. These have festered untended for decades, but now have to be addressed.