10 Consequential Days: How Biden Navigated War, Covid and the Supreme Court

Sunday, Feb. 20

If there was one message that Mr. Biden needed to strengthen for his Nationwide Safety Council within the State of affairs Room on Sunday morning, it was that america remained “in lock step with allies and companions,” as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken put it later.

That need was on the core of the American response that Mr. Biden had devised with Mr. Blinken; Jake Sullivan, his nationwide safety adviser; and others. The outcomes would turn into clear quickly sufficient, as Mr. Biden’s group repeatedly waited for European nations to challenge sanctions earlier than following go well with.

Diplomacy, together with a 15-minute name between Mr. Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France, had achieved little to calm Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had grown pissed off by Mr. Biden’s warnings of an invasion. On the best way again from the Munich Safety Convention on Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to Mr. Biden from Air Power Two.

She had repeated to Mr. Zelensky that america believed a Russian invasion was imminent, she informed Mr. Biden. And he or she had assured Ukraine’s president that the administration was able to challenge financial penalties together with its European allies.

However questions of struggle and diplomacy gave method — briefly — to problems with public well being. That afternoon, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s high public well being adviser, arrived with some excellent news: We would lastly be capable to take off our masks.

Mr. Biden had been below rising strain from Democratic governors to handle the nervousness amongst voters exhausted by the restrictions. However, as he had promised, he was ready for the C.D.C. Federal well being officers had been working for weeks on steerage that implies that 70 % of People would be capable to cease carrying masks, the start of a transition from a pandemic to an endemic illness that will turn into part of on a regular basis life.

However on that Sunday, he had little time to dwell on the pandemic. By later within the afternoon, aides had ushered him into the State Eating Room, the place a lectern was ready. It was his first alternative to apply an early draft of his State of the Union tackle.