Table of contents for November 23, 2020 in TIME Magazine

UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, FEW AMERICANS would know Emily Murphy’s name. The head of the General Services Administration (GSA) is the ultimate Washington bureaucrat, responsible for signing the leases and procuring the supplies that keep the Executive Branch running. “I am not here to garner headlines or make a name for myself,” she testified in 2017. “My goal is to do my part in making the federal government more efficient, effective and responsive to the American people.” The Senate unanimously confirmed her to her post, which she has held ever since. But in the days after Joe Biden was determined to have won the presidential election, Murphy found herself at the center of the most tumultuous transfer of power in decades. Media outlets from the Associated Press to Fox News called…

IN OCTOBER 2019, ABOUT A YEAR BEfore Election Day, a lawyer representing Donald Trump made a striking argument before a courtroom in Manhattan. Even if the President were actually to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he could not be charged with a crime while in office, the lawyer, William Consovoy, told the court. He was careful to note, however, “This is not a permanent immunity.” That much is beyond dispute. While legal scholars have long debated whether a sitting President can be charged with a crime, they tend to agree that former Presidents are fair game. Their immunity from prosecution disappears when they leave office, and that is a sobering thought for a President with as many legal vulnerabilities as Trump. Prosecutors in Manhattan spent the past year investigating…

AMERICANS HAVE VOTED and, with overwhelming numbers, declared they have had enough of Donald Trump and his political circus. One feels a sense of relief, but victories are rarely complete and total. Millions of Americans believe Joe Biden’s election represents the end of the country as we know it. They brace themselves for a socialist takeover and an assault on their liberties. The ugliness of the defeated, and that ugliness was never theirs alone, remains. We have to navigate what has been left behind, walk among the dry bones and muster the courage to respond to it all. Biden will have to confront what Trump refused to face: that our way of life is broken. Americans are disaffected, distrustful and full of disdain. This state of affairs, in part,…

DEMOCRATS HAD HIGH HOPES FOR HEALTH CARE. After winning big on the issue in the 2018 midterms, Democrats swaggered into 2020 convinced they had a mandate to transform the industry. The only question was how best to do it. In the Democratic primary, Joe Biden’s plan to add a government-run “public option” for health insurance to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) emerged as the moderate alternative to the left’s dream of Medicare for All. But the party’s big plans may already be in jeopardy. One problem is the challenge of a divided Senate. Even if Democrats win the January runoff for both Georgia Senate seats, the chamber will likely be split 50-50. This would give Vice President–elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote, but Biden would still need to negotiate…

THE FINANCE GUY HAS BEEN A STOCK CHARACTER EVER since Gordon Gekko slithered onto the screen in 1987’s Wall Street, preaching the gospel of greed. We’ve seen nominally diversified variations on the theme, from Working Girl to Showtime’s Black Monday. Yet the genre has barely evolved since the ’80s, despite significant shifts in public opinion on banking. Which is why it’s been surprising to see HBO’s Industry attract so little attention. The smart, thoroughly contemporary drama follows postcollegiate recruits at fictional London firm Pierpoint & Co. In an atmosphere thick with performative confidence, where a tiny mistake could end a career before it’s begun, new hires must prove their mettle while accounting for how their race, class, gender and sexuality might affect their prospects in a field that isn’t…

THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN A DRAGON IS A DRAGON SLAYER. For four years, Donald Trump’s penchant for division and chaos was the dominant force in American life. In the end, after a long and excruciating battle, it was vanquished by Joe Biden’s promise of decency, unity and national healing. Biden’s win was at once widely anticipated and stubbornly doubted, and came after days of agonizing vote counts that began with deficits in key swing states. Biden stayed calm through early defeats on election night, urged patience during delays in crucial states and projected confidence despite torrents of disinformation spread by the President. By Nov. 7, it was clear Biden had rebuilt the so-called blue wall that crumbled in 2016; first Wisconsin, then Michigan, then finally Pennsylvania tipped in…

WHEN AMERICANS ELECTED KAMALA HARRIS Vice President, they symbolically completed a 150-year project of recognizing the right of Black people to exercise the full franchise as citizens. In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote. In 1920, the 19th Amendment secured the franchise for women. We commemorated both of these milestones this year, even as scholars acknowledged the ways African-American women were overlooked and, because of extreme racial repression, did not get to vote in significant numbers until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. We also marked the battle to expand the franchise under the shadow of a massive voter-suppression campaign undertaken by conservative politicians and the current President. Stacey Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial loss in Georgia indicated that the only way to overcome all…

AS THE SHADOWS LENGTHENED, FRANKLIN Roosevelt’s mind returned to the beginning. At his fourth Inaugural, held on Saturday, Jan. 20, 1945—the President had less than three months to live—FDR recalled the words of his old prep school headmaster, Endicott Peabody, who often remarked, “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward.” Or so FDR and generations of Americans have hoped. One of those forward-looking Americans is now the President-elect of the United States. The task awaiting Joe Biden in Washington is immense; arguably, he faces the most crises to confront a single President since FDR took office in…

IT ALL FINALLY CAUGHT UP TO HIM. THE LIES, THE boasts, the disorder and disastrous management, the rants and the race-baiting, the predatory instincts and compulsion to dominate—all the things that made Donald Trump the ringmaster of the American political circus at last compelled a majority of voters to drive him out of the tent. Modern American history had not seen his like: a showman President who held rapt the country he inflamed, and asked little of citizens except praise. In the end, Trump’s pride did not just precede his fall; it precipitated it. Until the final months, his campaign was managed by a novice. Trump thought he could wish away a deadly virus. He governed only to his base and, facing re-election without ever having cracked 50% approval…

“IF THE PUBLIC-HEALTH PROFESSIONALS, IF DR. [Anthony] Fauci, if doctors tell us we should take it, I would be first in line. If Donald Trump tells us we should take it, then I’m not taking it.” That was Vice President–elect Kamala Harris’ response when asked by the moderator of an Oct. 7 debate whether she would get vaccinated against COVID-19. It perfectly captured the politicization of the U.S. response to COVID-19 under the outgoing Trump Administration—and how dangerous that red and blue tinting of the pandemic response has been for the American public. Behaviors like wearing masks and social distancing, which should be about protecting public health, have turned into loaded statements of party affiliation and were twisted into campaign strategy, no doubt contributing to the high death toll…

THIS YEAR’S STRING OF CLIMATE CATASTROPHES is hard to miss. During the 2020 presidential campaign, more named tropical storms made landfall in one U.S. hurricane season than ever before. For the first time this century, a single wildfire burned more than 1 million acres in the lower 48 states. By September, the country had tied the record for the most billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in one year, with four months still to go before 2021. As the U.S. burned and flooded, Joe Biden leaned into climate change more than any other general-election presidential contender in U.S. history. Now, even as he faces the possibility of a divided Congress, Biden is expected to place cutting emissions close to the center of his presidency, incorporating the aim into policy decisions…