 Well, it's official. Joe Biden is now the 46th president of the United States. Donald Trump is out of office. And if I could get a live feed of Donald Trump right now and what he's doing, I would pay any amount for that. I would give an arm and a leg for that because that would be very entertaining. In fact, more so than the inauguration itself. Because Donald Trump, you know, he's mad and the way that he left was to the song YMCA, which didn't necessarily seem fitting for the occasion. Like he probably should have played something more emo, maybe Lincoln Park, because we know that he's really butthurt right now because he wanted to win and he wanted to win so bad he literally tried to destroy democracy to remain in power. But I mean, that's all behind us now. The Trump era is officially over and Joseph R. Biden is the president. And I want to just take a moment to kind of talk about all of that, because this really is important. You know, for me, I am not excited about Joe Biden. I feel like if you are excited that Donald Trump is out of office, that's great. Take this time to celebrate. It's a pretty dark time in American history and human history. So if seeing him sworn in gives you joy, then genuinely don't like take that away from yourself. Like if you're a Bernie Sanders supporter like me, you know, we all know what to expect with Joe Biden. This is not going to usher in some new era of progressivism in American politics. He's not going to be the next FDR and he's not up to the challenge, quite frankly. But just seeing Donald Trump out of office after especially last year, he became even more brazenly authoritarian, arresting folks in Portland, Oregon, throwing them in unmarked vehicles, threatening to use the insurrection act. It is nice to see someone, you know, be weirded out of office. And I will say that Kamala Harris being the first female president, that really is significant. You know, she is not someone who I like, her politics don't match mine at all. She is a neoliberal, which means she supports free market capitalist solutions to political problems. You know, I don't like Kamala Harris, but I'm not going to deny the importance of the symbolism there. Like the fact that we have a female vice president who is a black woman. This this really is, I think it is important. It is important for young girls to see a woman in power, right? But putting all of that aside, what we need from these next couple of years are tangibles. We need policy concessions. We need Joe Biden to deliver. We need the Democratic Party to deliver because guess what? All eyes are on them now. They have 100 percent of the blame if things don't go well in this country. And trust me, Republicans are very disciplined in their messaging, so they're going to be blamed no matter what. So what Democrats have to do is prove to the American people that they are delivering for them cut through the propaganda, cut through the bullshit. And the way that you can do this easily is to give people two thousand dollar checks, make sure they have health care, make sure that during this pandemic they're taken care of. And what's really important, I think for this next year and the way that I would measure Joe Biden as having a successful first year is if he is able to get COVID-19 under control. And that's something that's relatively difficult to do, given that we're at a state where we're seeing like four thousand deaths per day. We're going to surpass five hundred thousand deaths, probably in a month or so. Like it's really serious. So if he can actually follow through on that promise of getting a hundred million people vaccinated in the first 100 days, I think that is that's huge. That's really, really substantial and praiseworthy. And I will praise him and give him credit for that if he can actually accomplish this. But I am skeptical because logistically speaking, that seems really difficult to do, given how poor shape we're in currently. But if Joe Biden at a minimum can get COVID-19 under control and do a better job than Donald Trump, which I suspect he will, then I think, you know, already by that standard alone, he'll be better than Donald Trump. And it's not a very high bar to pass. Donald Trump was a terrible president. I don't think he's as bad as George W. Bush was in terms of the damage that he caused. But if we were to give him another term, I think we would have plausibly seen him actually strike around, like see damage on the scale that George W. Bush caused internationally and certainly domestically, you know, with his incompetence, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, rather, he has a lot of blood on his hands and he's going to have to live with that for the rest of his life. But I don't think he's ever going to come to terms with that. So the best that we can hope for now in this new era, this Biden era is that, you know, folks don't take this as a sign that things have returned to normal because a country that allows the rise of a demagogue, that's not normal circumstances. There were underlying material conditions and racism that was never eradicated and white supremacy, all of which led to Donald Trump. So if we genuinely want to stop the rise of the next Donald Trump, whoever that may be, we have to make sure that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party are held accountable for everything that they do. They actually take meaningful steps to change the material conditions in this country. Now, even if they're successful and, you know, it's the best case scenario and they actually really do improve the standard of living for everyone, that doesn't mean that, you know, the possibility of the next Trump coming to power is entirely eliminated because, you know, if you give people money and they have jobs and they're not impoverished and desperate, that doesn't necessarily mean that racism and white supremacy vanishes like that. That's a separate issue that we have to tackle, right? But I mean, class and race issues, they are interconnected. And, you know, if we don't address these issues in the next four years, then I do worry that the next demagogue who comes along is going to be more effective and more nefarious than Donald Trump. You know, Donald Trump, the things that he wanted to accomplish, he was unable to accomplish because he doesn't really know what he's doing. As president, he was in over his head, but someone who actually knows how to will power appropriately, they can do a lot more damage than Donald Trump. And I fear that that's going to happen if Democrats fail here. So the task ahead of them is absolutely gigantic. And, you know, my expectations for the Democratic Party are low because they've let me down time and again. But what we should want from them, like what we should get, our expectations should be high, even if, you know, we don't expect them to do a lot. But we'll have to wait and see. Like I genuinely hope that Joe Biden proves me wrong, right? I've been very hard on Joe Biden. I've been relentless in attacking him. And part of that is because I'm just kind of a bitter bitch. I wanted Bernie Sanders to be president. I have no problem admitting that. But now Joe Biden is president, like it or not, that's the reality. So I hope that he actually proves me wrong and delivers. But we'll have to wait and see. And certainly if he doesn't, I'm going to hold him accountable. But if he does something good that warrants praise, then I will absolutely give him credit. Again, I've said this once, I'll say it again. I don't want to establish like a narrative on this channel that either Joe Biden, good Joe Biden, bad, I want to be objective. I want to be impartial. And so as a leftist, if Joe Biden does something that I agree with, I'm going to give him credit for that. And that's the way that I think that political commentators should respond to the Biden administration going forward. Even though I hated Donald Trump, I did give him credit where it was due. I think that his criminal justice reform, the first step act was a step in the right direction, albeit a small one. I think that him attempting to make peace with North Korea, even if that was frowned upon by mainstream media and the elite class, I think that was good. Anyone pursuing peace, even if they don't necessarily know how to facilitate that, they get credit for that, even if you're Donald Trump, even if the rest of your administration is doing harm and damage. So having said that, though, yeah, we have a new president. It's Joe Biden. And look, I'll just say I am I am a little bit relieved that Trump is out of power. Like there was a moment in time after the election where I was genuinely concerned that Trump maybe would be successful at somehow stealing it. I mean, we saw back in 2000, the way that George W. Bush kind of stole that election from Al Gore. But this time there were just too many states. You know, it was it was too difficult for him to pull this off. He wasn't competent to pull this off. So, yeah, now we go forward and do everything in our power to make the best of the situation that we're in and hope that we at least at a minimum can expect that Joe Biden will handle this pandemic better and more competently. And I think that we can at least expect that. But of course, he's got to do more than just that structural changes need to happen if we want to prevent the rise of another Donald Trump. But I'll leave that there because at this point, I feel like I'm just rambling. I just wanted to share my thoughts on Biden being sworn in because overall, like, you know, I feel not much. I kind of feel numb, not in a bad way or a good way. I just kind of feel ambivalent because, you know, sure, I'm relieved that Trump is out of office, but Biden, you know, he is someone who I think even though there will be a lot of net positives with him being in office, there's going to be some downsides to it as well. So we'll have to deal with that on a case by case basis. But for now, at least Trump's out of office. That's that's a good thing. That in and of itself, I think is worthy of celebration, even if the person who's replacing him is not my first choice. Or second choice or 18th choice if we're being serious.