New presidents typically use their inaugural addresses to bind the wounds of bitter elections, to reaffirm America's founding values and to inspire the country to join in a momentous national effort.
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin Roosevelt, whose Great Depression inheritance in 1933 is the closest modern equivalent to Biden's.
As he worked on his own inaugural address, Biden had to contemplate a pandemic that has never been worse, a vaccine rollout that is a confusing mess, an economy pulverized by shutdowns and a generation of kids who have missed critical months of in-person schooling.
His challenges have become even more acute since the election, as Trump's refusal to admit defeat and attempt to steal Biden's victory, as well as an insurrection against Congress, hammered Biden's legitimacy and exposed a White nationalist internal insurgency that will pose an ongoing threat to US security and democracy.
While Roosevelt's famous line might find an echo in Biden's approach to the pandemic, the nation's fractured political state recalls Lincoln's frantic efforts to keep it together during his 1861 inaugural.
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection," the 16th President warned months before the outbreak of the Civil War.
America's current chasms suggest yet more synergy between Biden and his moment of history.
Despite decades of worsening national polarization, the President-elect still thinks he can enlist his old Senate Republican sparring partner, Mitch McConnell, in passing elements of his legislative agenda and a new pandemic stimulus plan.
Many Democrats are highly skeptical. And Republicans who live in fear of Trump and his 74 million voters have no reason to make Biden's presidency a success. But Biden's old-fashioned bet on building an administration on compromise at a time when such sentiments have rarely been less incentivized was attractive to many voters weary of Washington's partisan wars.
And after Trump tried to make it a liability in the campaign, his half-century career as a Washington insider might just equip him to overhaul the lame federal response to Covid-19 and lead the country out of its nightmare.