Joe Biden's talk of 'healing' is pointless, and will be seen as weakness by the right | Nesrine Malik

The new president needs to be fearlessly radical - it's the only way to rebalance the economy and tackle the causes of division

Normal. The United States is returning to normal. During Joe Biden's inauguration, the commentary was overwhelmingly about a country slowly regaining consciousness, blinking away the bad dream that was Donald Trump. That state of normal was one of not just reinstating all the protocols and rituals of high office, but of the pastoral hand of the president. Biden will now heal" the nation and rebuild America's standing in the world. Civility" will cleanse the US of the previous administration's toxicity.

But against the backdrop of the past four years in general and the previous two weeks in particular, the ceremonials all felt a bit flat, like trying to burn incense to banish the smell of a rotting corpse. Trump may be gone as president, but the morbidities he exposed remain. They hang heavily in the air: the 74 million people who voted for him despite four years of lies and carnage; the proportion of voters who still think the election was stolen; the ongoing round-up of those who stormed the Capitol; the hundreds of thousands of lives claimed by coronavirus.