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Inauguration Day was the easy part, now come the challenges for Biden

Now comes the hard part.

President Joe Biden comes to power at a time when the United States faces more challenges, and more threats, than perhaps at any time in its history.

Is this hyperbole? Abraham Lincoln had the Civil War, a massive insurrection that took 750,000 lives in four years. In 2021 terms, that’s 11 million people. Obviously nothing can compare with that. Yet Lincoln didn’t face, at the same time, an expansionist China, Russian cyber hacking, Iranian crazies, or an erratic North Korea that says it has missiles that threaten the continental United States.

Nor did Lincoln have to deal with climate change. And that outrageous image of that traitor waving a Confederate flag in the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection? That never happened during the Civil War.

Economic disaster facing Biden

Is it hyperbole to compare what Biden has inherited with what faced Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933? The Great Depression was well underway, unemployment hit 24.9%, and tens of millions of Americans lost their homes. “Brother can you spare a dime?” asked one popular song. Few could. The official unemployment today — 6.7% — isn’t anywhere near that. But this is deceptive. A broader Labor Department measure of unemployment, which some economists say better reflects the true health of the U.S. labor force is 11.7%. Not quite 1933, Still, here's some other sobering data:

► 2020 was the worst year for job losses since 1939.

Food insecurity threatens some 50 million Americans, including a potential 17 million children.

President Joe Biden on Jan. 19, 2021, in New Castle, Delaware.
President Joe Biden on Jan. 19, 2021, in New Castle, Delaware.

Americans who are hungry and/or jobless? This weakens us and crimps our future, and thus is a national security threat. I could provide a lot more examples here, but you get the point.

And the threats that would rear their ugly heads later in the 1930s — Nazi Germany and Japan — weren’t on FDR’s radar when he was sworn in. Cyber attacks? Hypersonic missiles? Climate change? No, no, and no. “The only thing we have to fear,” our 32nd president famously said in his first inaugural address, “is fear itself.” Perhaps.

In Roosevelt’s time — nearly a century ago — two great oceans protected us from invasion. This certainly isn’t the case now. Sept. 11 showed that to be the case 20 years ago, and fears of a “cyber 9/11” keep U.S. security planners awake at night now. Our electric grid, communication and financial networks and more, all are said to be vulnerable in ways that most Americans cannot begin to fathom.

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Complicating all of this for our 46th president is a broad swath of the public that has been so thoroughly brainwashed and deluded, that they actually believe the crackpot conspiracy theories that our former president spent years spreading, and which senior leaders in his own party eagerly repeated. Repeating them as well were assorted college dropouts masquerading as oracles on fact-free cable channels and the radio airwaves. The damage they have done is incalculable.

Trying to heal deep damage

Biden has said he wants to be a healer and uniter. That’s a wonderful sentiment. But many Americans — we saw some on Jan. 6 — are likely beyond redemption. They are cop killers and insurrectionists. In his second Inaugural address in 1865, Lincoln spoke of the need “to bind up the nation's wounds,” but this burst of eloquence came after four years of war that dealt vengeance to such traitors.

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And I haven’t even mentioned the threat that is front and center for Biden: the COVID-19 pandemic. It is worse than ever. On Tuesday, Inauguration eve, the U.S. death toll passed 400,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. Incoming White House Chief of Staff Ron Klein said on CNN over the weekend that another 100,000 Americans could perish in the next few weeks, lifting the death toll over half-a-million.

The president has vowed 100 million vaccinations in 100 days. We must hope he succeeds. We must hope he also succeeds at managing all the other dangers we face: Overseas, homegrown, man-made — unprecedented in scope and variety.

Paul Brandus is the founder and White House bureau chief of West Wing Reports and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. His latest book is "Jackie: Her Transformation from First Lady to Jackie O." Follow him on Twitter: @WestWingReport

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden and Harris face a mountain of threats that would vex anyone