It’s quite a contrast to the previous four years, when former President Donald Trump held court in the room from behind the oak timbers of the Resolute Desk, shooting off unpredictable, unscripted comments and belittling rivals as the cameras rolled. The desk was often bare, save a secure telephone and a red button he could press to order a Diet Coke. (“Do you want something to drink, folks?” Trump asked TIME reporters when he pushed the button on his desk during an Oval Office interview in June 2019. A drink arrived, but just for him.) In the waning weeks of Trump’s presidency, the room became a clearinghouse for fake conspiracies and lies that massive voter fraud cost Trump the election. (It didn’t.)
Now Trump’s soda button is gone, and more than two weeks into his presidency, Biden has brought an abrupt shift in tone to the oblong room that Trump used as a soapbox to advance his personal political power. At one end of the National Mall, Senators prepare to consider the charge that Trump incited an insurrection in the former President’s second impeachment trial, a little over a month after a violent mob stormed the Capitol. Near the other, at 1600 Pennsylvania, Biden is going about tough, quiet business of running a country. The sudden change of atmosphere signals that America may be moving past its crisis of democracy, but the other crises the country faces — the pandemic, the economy, structural racism and the changing climate — present daunting tasks for Biden.
“He’s lowered the toxic tone of Washington coming from the Oval Office at least, and that’s what people were looking for,” says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. Trump used the Oval Office as a site to “launch toxic rhetoric and attack people,” Zelizer says, where as Biden is “using it as a site of governing.”
Biden’s careful approach to his first two weeks on the job comes as a jarring, grinding downshift. And it’s not necessarily one that long-time Biden watchers may have predicted. Earlier in his career, Biden earned a reputation as an affable, glad-handing gaffe machine, who often revealed what he was thinking even when that wasn’t the most politic move. But Biden brought a new discipline to the 2020 campaign trail — much of it forced by the strict pandemic precautions he took — that has carried into his presidency.
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