Top five takeaways from Biden’s first town hall

Joe Biden gave the first town hall of his presidency on CNN on Tuesday evening, taking questions from host Anderson Cooper and a socially distanced studio audience in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The new president’s primary concern was allaying fears about the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 488,000 Americans and devastated the country’s economy.

He also addressed concerns about Covid-19 vaccine availability, school reopenings, criminal justice, domestic terrorism and reflected on his own ascent to the White House after four tumultuous years under Donald Trump.

Here are our top five takeaways from the Q&A.

1. Biden hopes US will be back to normal by Christmas

The Democrat’s primary goal was to promote his relief plan to curtail the coronavirus pandemic, which he pledged would “go big”, but he nevertheless struck an exceedingly cautious note on the easing of social distancing rules, declining to promise an end date.

“As my mother would say, with the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbours, that by next Christmas I think we’ll be in a very different circumstance, God willing, than we are today,” he said.

“A year from now, I think that there’ll be significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, having to wear a mask,” Mr Biden continued. “I don’t want to over promise anything here.”

“Be careful not to predict things you don’t know for certain because then you’ll be held accountable.”

2. President says teachers should be vaccinated as a priority but has no set date for schools reopening

Mr Biden won a round of applause for his response to a question from a father of four when he suggested that inoculating teachers was key to securing school reopenings.

“There’s a lot of things we can do,” he said. “I think that we should be vaccinating teachers. We should move them up in the hierarchy as well.”

The president said that by the end of July there would be more than 600m doses of the vaccine available, “enough to vaccinate every American”.

However, he stopped short of offering Mr Cooper an exact date on when elementary and middle schools would be fully open.

“I think we’ll be close to that by the end of the first 100 days,” he said. “We’ve had a significant percentage of them be open. My guess is they’re probably going to be pushing to be open all summer, to continue like it’s a different semester.”

Mr Biden also struck a kindly note when a mother asked what her message for the future should be to her eight-year-old daughter.

“Don’t be scared, honey,” he answered, also offering to help another woman in securing a vaccination appointment for her 19-year-old son suffering from pediatric chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

3. Biden vows to end jail time for drug offences, says he will not defund police and attacks ‘demented’ white supremacists

The president also spoke out on the state of policing and prison sentencing in the US when asked about how to not “over legislate” officers in high crime neighbourhoods while training them to “police with compassion” in the wake of last summer’s George Floyd demonstrations.

“By number one, not defunding the police,” he answered.

“We have to put more money into police work so that we have legitimate community policing and we are in a situation where we change the legislation.

“No one should go to jail for a drugs offence, no one should go to jail for the use of a drug, they should go to drug rehabilitation.

“We should be in the position where we change the sentencing system to one that relates to a notion of making sure you focus on making sure there is rehabilitation.”

On the more general question of political polarisation, he said: “The nation is not divided. You have fringes on both ends.”

Mr Biden went on to denounce white supremacists as “the greatest domestic terror threat in America”, calling them “demented” and “dangerous”.

“It’s complex, it’s wide-ranging, and it’s real,” he said of the issue. “I would make sure that my Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division is focused heavily on those very folks, and I would make sure that we, in fact, focus on how to deal with the rise of white supremacy.”

4. President says he’s ‘tired’ of talking about Trump

Perhaps understandably, the president confessed he was sick of discussing the antics of his predecessor and revealed that Mr Trump was the only former US president who had not contacted him to wish him well in his new job.

“All of them have, with one exception, picked up the phone and called me as well,” Mr Biden said, winning a knowing chuckle from the audience.

Mr Trump did leave a note for his successor on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office but the president has so far declined to disclose its content.

Mr Biden also refused to intervene or offer any commentary on his predecessor’s impeachment trial in the Senate over his role in the Capitol riot, which saw Mr Trump acquitted despite the vote passing 57-43 in favour of conviction because the necessary two-thirds supermajority was not forthcoming.

5. Biden says White House is ‘a gilded cage’

The president, known for his folksy turn of phrase and commitment to his working class roots, was also in a reflective mood on the subject of his elevation to commander-in-chief.

“I get up in the morning, look at Jill and say, ‘where are we?’” he joked, adding that even though he has been president for only four weeks, events are moving so fast it already feels like four years.

He also revealed he felt “extremely self-conscious” about the White House staff waiting on him.

“I don’t know about you all, but I was raised in a way that you didn’t look for anybody to wait on you,” he said. “And it’s where I find myself extremely self-conscious for wonderful people who work in the White House. When someone standing there hands me my suit coat.”

He also compared the experience of living at the White House with that of the vice president’s official residence at the Naval Observatory in north west Washington, DC, where he lived between 2009 and 2017 as Barack Obama’s deputy.

Mr Biden said that the vice president’s house offered ample room to swim, explore and exercise in greater privacy.

But he added that he feels a “sense of history” at his new home, as he hears historians discuss his illustrious predecessors who rose to their moment, admitting he felt more comfortable thinking of himself in relation to the past seven American presidents, all of whom he knew well, rather than the “superhuman” likes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D Roosevelt.