Sensemaker: Biden’s time

• Pfizer hailed “a great day for science” as it reported that the Covid vaccine it has developed with BioNTech in the US offers 90 per cent protection against the virus.
• Kamala Harris said that while she was the first woman to win the vice presidency, she would not be the last.
• Azerbaijan claimed to have taken the key town of Shusha in its war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Trump-slayer has 73 days before he finally moves into the White House, 33 years after his first attempt. By convention he’ll then have 100 days to make a splash. After that his political capital will start draining rapidly because no-one seriously expects him to run for a second term. So no pressure.

To do:

• Covid. Today he’ll name a 12-person Covid task force to find a way to suppress the virus that helped him win. In principle that could mean copying successful strategies rolled out in places like Australia, Taiwan and South Korea. In practice America’s too big and varied for an off-the-shelf solution and the Biden plan will have to be more piecemeal (see below).
• Climate. As expected, Biden will reverse Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord on day one in office. This will be important symbolically, but it could be much more than that (ditto).
• Immigration. He’s expected to use executive orders to end Trump’s travel ban on visitors from seven mainly-Muslim countries, set out a route to US citizenship for children of illegal immigrants and create a task force to reunite the families of 500 children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
• Global leadership. He’ll rejoin the World Health Organisation, reassure Nato that the US is serious about the mutual defence of the world’s leading democracies, and tell the P5+1 that it wants to revive the Iran nuclear deal.
• Trade. Biden’s campaign version of Trump’s economic nationalism was “Buy American”. Translation: he cannot afford to be seen to be soft on China and may be slower to unwind Trump’s tariffs than hardline free traders would like. On trade with Europe, which is worth a third more to the US than its trade with China, there will be a reset but no quick revival of the abandoned TTIP deal.
• A US-UK deal? Not so fast. Biden identifies as Irish. He’s already made clear there will be no bilateral post-Brexit deal that puts the Good Friday Agreement at risk. Bottom line: this is a backburner issue for the incoming administration, but at least that means no serious prospect of chlorinated chicken in your local Sainos.

Team Biden. At 78 the top man won’t have the energy of, say, Obama at 47 in 2008, which is all the more reason his senior appointments matter deeply in terms of tone, policy and execution. Here are some of the more likely ones:

• State. Once in the running to be Biden’s vice presidential pick, former national security adviser Susan Rice is now a favourite to be America’s next top diplomat. It wouldn’t be her first shot at the job; in 2012, she dropped out of the running amid Conservative criticism of her handling of a deadly terrorist attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Less controversial among conservatives and also a front-runner is Tony Blinken, a stalwart of Biden’s 2008 nomination run and his 2020 campaign who served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of State under Obama.
• Defence. Harvard and Oxford educated with decades of experience, Michèle Flournoy has already served as undersecretary of defence for policy, with a focus on “growing Chinese assertiveness and military strength and eroding US deterrence”. She’d be the first woman to run the Pentagon.
• Treasury. Lael Brainard, an economist and advocate of financial regulation, would be the first woman to lead the Treasury. She’s worked for (Bill) Clinton as well as Obama and serves on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. Brainard would perhaps be a less progressive choice than other picks (Elizabeth Warren was another name floated for the role) but more palatable to a Republican-leaning Senate.
• Press. A regular cable news pundit and a senior adviser on Biden’s campaign, Symone Sanders is tipped to become his press secretary. She cut her teeth on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign aged only 26. At 30 she would be the youngest of Biden’s corps of close advisers and the first black woman to face the press in the White House’s Brady Briefing Room.
• Chief of Staff. A veteran Democratic aide and people-wrangler, Ron Klain first crossed paths with Biden during his 1987 presidential campaign. He served as Biden’s vice presidential chief of staff and filled the same role for Al Gore in the 1990s. Pandemic response is, usefully, another area of expertise for Klain – he was Obama’s “Ebola czar” in 2014.
• Health and Human Services. Moving quickly on Covid will be a top priority come January, so it makes sense that a front-runner for health secretary is someone already close to the transition team’s pandemic strategy. Michelle Lujan Grisham, governor of New Mexico, is a co-chair of Biden’s transition committee and has run a health agency before: she served as director of New Mexico’s health department for several years. Vivek Murthy, formerly Surgeon General under Obama, is another candidate.
• UN Ambassador. Pete Buttigieg, the smooth-talking polyglot and former Rhodes Scholar who ran for the Democratic nomination, is tipped for what could be a crucial role in America’s effort to rebuild its leadership credentials after the Trump experiment. Biden insiders have pitched him for the prestigious UN job not least because the former mayor of South Bend is said to have reached a political dead end in Indiana.

Meanwhile, back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…

Trump was golfing in Virginia when the networks called the race for Biden. As his campaign released a statement saying it would continue to fight in the courts, the president finished his round, posed for a picture with a newlywed and wished her and her companions “a nice life”.

Reporters said he returned to the White House through a side door, with a slump in his shoulders. What’s been going on inside since then?

• Trump has tweeted 20 times since Saturday, to a winnowed audience. Thirteen have been flagged by Twitter as misleading, which limits their reach.
• The family has argued, probably. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, may have advised him to concede. That’s according to CNN, but Axios reports that Kushner is in fact advising Trump to take his election defeat to the courts. The president’s sons are also geeing him up. Don Jr. and Eric have been the biggest advocates of the “rigged election” narrative on Twitter in the past few days. But Trump’s daughter Ivanka is running as an unlucky favourite for the inevitable intervention.
• Republicans are still on the Titanic. On Saturday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declined to acknowledge Biden’s victory. Trump ally Lindsey Graham has defended Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. As of yesterday, only two Republican senators – Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney – had publicly congratulated Biden.
• The Trump campaign has geared up for a fight without a strategy. According to NYT’s Maggie Haberman, Kushner was searching for a lawyer to head up the legal effort as recently as Thursday. They plumped in the end for conservative activist and alleged fraudster David Bossie, who is not a lawyer.
• But it’s getting a bit whispery. Someone close to the White House told MSNBC: “No one is willing to tell King Lear the truth.” Trump, according to Haberman, wants people out “fighting”. Like Lear on the heath he is trying to muster up cataracts and hurricanoes. His problem is that with only unsubstantiated legal claims, he’ll struggle to make a squall.

In the app today…. Listen to the latest Slow Newscast, on Jack Ma and his run-in with Chinese authority days before his second tech giant was due to go public. It’s a cracking story about life, Communism and banking. Sign up for tonight’s ThinkIn, with Lionel Barber, former FT editor, on 21st century power; and for tomorrow’s at 8am on Ma – is he the world’s greatest entrepreneur or has he flown too close to the sun?

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What the markets think
Markets don’t think, of course, any more than a shoal of sardines does when attacked by tuna. But still, when the race was called at cappuccino time on Saturday, US funds linked to healthcare and student loan stocks picked up, and funds linked to clean energy stocks dipped. They haven’t moved much since ($). This is as much about the Senate as the White House. Without a clear Senate majority Biden will not get congressional approval for his full $2 trillion build-back-better plan, which would be expensive for healthcare providers and include big student loan write-offs. Expect all that to change again if Dems win both Georgia Senate seats in January.

E-bikes in Amsterdam
Electronic bikes and scooters are increasingly part of the furniture in cities, but they do pose some dangers – 65 people in the Netherlands died in e-bike accidents last year. E-bikes will only get faster and more powerful as the technology develops so the Netherlands is, sensibly, acting now to adapt its infrastructure and accommodate them safely. Amsterdam is trialling a piece of tech that will slow down e-bikes in urban areas; the new digital infrastructure will send signals to the bikes to cut their speed when they enter busy neighbourhoods.

Eco-America
The Paris climate agreement is aspirational, not binding. American non-involvement made this a fatal flaw. If the world’s biggest economy wasn’t interested, why should anyone else take it seriously? This applied especially to China, the fastest-growing polluter, and India, still heavily dependent on coal. But American support for Paris should at a stroke turn their indifference into isolation, and a new anxiety not to be left behind in terms of emissions goals is already evident in Beijing. Also: Biden plans to reverse executive orders signed by Trump expanding oil exploration in coastal US waters and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Hundreds of thousands of caribou and millions of people who simply like nature can breathe easy at last.

Facts are back
Biden’s Covid task force is expected to focus on mask-wearing, therapeutics, vaccine distribution and morale. The first will involve delicate handling of state governments, especially red ones. The third could involve mass production of the new Pfizer vaccine. Long term, the last could be the most important. At the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, Trump’s four-year assault on science and reality demoralised everyone who valued them, and made fools of agency leaders who tried to walk the line between sound policy and a delusional presidency. As the US Covid death toll approaches quarter of a million, sending a clear signal from the top that facts are back is the president-elect’s most urgent task.

Party time?
The streets filled, music blared, social distancing was largely forgotten. In a great exhalation, many of the 75 million Americans who backed the Biden-Harris ticket came out to party over the weekend. Gas stations became spontaneous dance venues. But 70-odd million also voted for Trump. One of them completed a road trip from the Midwest to Eureka, California, last week, and posted a short video of himself musing that he’d only seen Trump flags along the way. One country. Two ships passing in the night.

UK
9/11 – UK and EU Brexit negotiations continue; Wales due to come out of two-week “firebreak” lockdown; Mark Carney, COP26 finance adviser and former Bank of England governor, sets out roadmap for financing net zero, 10/11 – chair of NHS Test and Trace Dido Harding appears before select committee; Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse due to publish results of investigation into Catholic Church, 11/11 – Armistice Day; logistics sector representatives address Commons Brexit committee; former Team Sky and British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman appears before Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service, 12/11 – UK quarterly GDP estimates due from ONS; US disease head Anthony Fauci speaks at Chatham House webinar; first person charged in UK over refusal to wear face mask appears in court, 13/11 – Northern Ireland circuit breaker restrictions due to be lifted; results of Labour’s National Executive Committee elections announced; BBC Children in Need, 14/11 – Prince Charles turns 72

World
9/11 – EU foreign affairs ministers meet to discuss future trade with US; McDonald’s releases quarterly results; former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci appears in the Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity, 10/11 – Supreme Court expected to hear Trump-backed challenge to Obamacare; Vatican releases investigation into Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, found guilty of sexually abusing minors and vulnerable adults, 11/11 – European Central Bank annual forum begins, 12/11 – Emmanuel Macron attends Paris Peace Forum; Fox Corporation annual shareholders’ meeting; The Masters golf major tournament begins in Augusta, Georgia, 13/11 – G20 finance ministers due to meet to discuss debt forgiveness amid Covid pandemic, 14/11 – Diwali marks start of Hindu New Year; EU sanctions against Venezuela due to expire, 15/11 – Moldovan presidential election runoff takes place

And one more thing…

Marvel at how Four Seasons Total Landscaping – a landscaping store not a high-end hotel – became the inadvertent backdrop for Trump’s Saturday news conference. Tellingly it resulted in Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani holding forth next to a sex shop called Fantasy Island.Thanks for reading, and do share this around.

Thanks for reading, and do share this around.

Giles Whittell
@GWhittell

Ella Hill
@_EllaHill

Patricia Clarke
@paticlarke

Xavier Greenwood
@XAMGreenwood