Biden’s Pandemic Challenge: Not Being Trump, Not Enough

President-elect Joe Biden will take office this week in the middle of an enormous public-health and economic crisis not of his own making. Our country is in an exceptionally difficult phase of that crisis now, with around 200,000 newly reported cases and several thousand reported deaths from COVID-19 each day. A new variant of the virus may soon yield another surge in caseloads just as the current wave recedes. And we are also in the middle of a massive and complex mobilization of vaccination capacity and reach. There are a lot of problems to fix, a lot of things to do better, and a lot of challenges and setbacks yet to come.

But to succeed in taking on all of that, Biden and his team will need to see that the crisis is not really of his predecessor’s making either. They will confront a powerful temptation to blame the assorted failures and inadequacies of the federal government’s response efforts on Donald Trump, and to define themselves in opposition to what the Trump administration has done. But that temptation could easily obscure more than it reveals about the best path forward.

About the Author

Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. His most recent book is American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- and Could Again.

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President-elect Joe Biden will take office this week in the middle of an enormous public-health and economic crisis not of his own making. Our country is in an exceptionally difficult phase of that crisis now, with around 200,000 newly reported cases and several thousand reported deaths from COVID-19 each day. A new variant of the virus may soon yield another surge in caseloads just as the current wave recedes. And we are also in the middle of a massive and complex mobilization of vaccination capacity and reach. There are a lot of problems to fix, a lot of things to do better, and a lot of challenges and setbacks yet to come.

But to succeed in taking on all of that, Biden and his team will need to see that the crisis is not really of his predecessor’s making either. They will confront a powerful temptation to blame the assorted failures and inadequacies of the federal government’s response efforts on Donald Trump, and to define themselves in opposition to what the Trump administration has done. But that temptation could easily obscure more than it reveals about the best path forward.

About the Author

Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is the director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. His most recent book is American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- and Could Again.