Last week  marked  a full year since the 2020 Presidential Election where Joe Biden defeated the incumbent President Donald Trump. President Biden has done plenty within his first year in office to separate himself from his tumultuous predecessor, but while progress has been made, he still has a ways to go.

Most notably, President Biden has made major headway in getting the COVID-19 pandemic  under control in the country. Everybody who wants to get a vaccine in the country can do so, allowing  most mask requirements to be eased for those who are fully vaccinated.

By summer time,  hospitalizations and death rates dropped to a low, but  the Delta variant caused another major wave in our country.

In response to the Delta variant spreading, President Biden announced a six-part plan to combat it. The plan includes a vaccination mandate for both federal employees and private companies who employ 100 or more. While this is a good start, the Biden administration needs to be more fierce in their efforts to curb COVID and the Delta variant.

This can be done by re-instituting mask mandates nationwide, requiring proof of vaccination before entry into public spaces and most importantly, creating a federal vaccination mandate, which has been done before in our history to curb and fully eliminate smallpox. Instituting a federal vaccination mandate  is the most reliable way to fully eliminate COVID as both a problem of the present and a potential one in the future.

When it comes to  combating climate change, President Biden has also made the proper strides. Upon becoming President, one of the first things he did was re-join the Paris Climate Accords.

The treaty’s main goal is to lower global temperature averages by two degrees Celsius (35.6 Fahrenheit), while also having  contributing countries attain net zero carbon emissions by 2030.

During the recent COP26 meeting amongst world leaders, Biden reiterated these goals, sharing that he wanted to drop carbon emissions 50 percent below where the U.S. was  in 2005 by the year 2030. Additionally, he  promised  legislation worth  over 500 billion dollars towards climate centered infrastructure.

While these promises are good hearted and in the right direction in fighting the ongoing climate crisis, actions are obviously needed to back these words up. It is still far too early to tell if President Biden will hold true to these pledges.

The public will need to continue to lay pressure on lawmakers, those in Congress and the Biden Administration to ensure these goals are on track to be complete, not just for the sake of our country, but the world.

One of President Biden’s biggest points in his campaign was to restore the soul of the nation. He wants to  unite a country in disarray, not just for the last 4 years, but brewing as early as 2000. Beyond promising to work towards bipartisan deals, this was something he never fully mapped out while out campaigning and now a year later.

America has been a divided state  for years now and the previous presidency only enhanced those divisions.

To restore the soul of America is no easy task and not one that Biden can do through any sort of policy enactments. To fix the soul of the country, Biden needs to be the antithesis of his predecessor.

Rather than leading with hatred, Biden needs to be open minded and hearted to not just restore the soul of the nation, but to open the souls of the country’s citizens. President Trump helped perpetuate the division through racist dog whistles,  policy choices and spewing falsities at every turn.

To truly begin the process of fixing the soul of the nation, President Biden needs to bring trust back to the office of the President. He must be a President who stands by their words and promises with real action. He must be  someone who is truthful, one who can speak to the American public without a veil of deception.

At this point, it is too early to tell what President Joe Biden’s overall impact on the country will be . He has made significant progress to both restore our standing on the world stage while making progress to lead the way only a year into the job.

Though there is more work to be done,  only time will tell if President Biden upholds his promises to the American people.