President Joe Biden delivers a speech after being sworn in as the 46th President of the United States during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S.

Four years after Donald Trump spoke of “American carnage” in his inaugural address, Joe Biden issued an urgent call for unity to a nation at war with itself.

Standing before a Capitol Building that two weeks earlier had been invaded by an angry mob of Trump supporters, facing a National Mall in which thousands of flags replaced the people banned from attending for fear of both violence and COVID-19, the 46th President proclaimed: “Democracy is precious, democracy is fragile.

Biden, one of the greatest any president has faced, is to prove that statement true.

Joe Biden’s inauguration was a remarkable moment in contrast to Trump’s America.

Vice President.

20, 2017, that one president was simply replacing another, an orderly and centuries-old transition of power, watched over by four former presidents – Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W.

Trump delivered his inaugural address.

It was a fear-inducing tirade in which he derided the people seated behind him, who “reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” in which he described a dystopian American landscape of poverty, failure, crime and addiction, and in which he pledged: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

Trump wasn’t at Joe Biden’s inauguration, of course.

Donald Trump was, by far, the worst president in the history of the republic.

Was Joe Biden’s inaugural address an act of national healing, an end to the American carnage of the past four years