After four nights of scalding and often shouted slash-and-burn attacks directed at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, it was quite a shock on Thursday night when Donald Trump nearly lulled America to sleep with his Republican National Convention speech on the south lawn of the White House.

It's not that Trump delivered a soothing address filled with warmth and good feeling. During long passages he savaged Biden as a Trojan Horse who would deliver America-hating socialists and anarchists to power. Those were the more lively sections of the speech. The trouble is that the charges against Biden had been made at the convention by many others before Trump, sometimes in identical language.

But even when the precise words weren't recycled, they still felt like retreads because the speech was mind-numbingly repetitive. How many times did Trump say that if Biden is elected the Democrats would come for America's guns? That it was time to bring jobs back from China? That the stakes in the election couldn't be higher? It's as if the authors of the address thought everything in it was so important it needed to be reiterated two or three times.

And then there were the lists. Lists of personages and events from American history at the beginning of the speech, and then again at the end of the speech. Lists, sprinkled throughout, of all the ways America is gloriously exceptional. Lists of Trump's wonderful, stupendous accomplishments. Lists of the wonderful, stupendous things he will accomplish if he's re-elected. The last of these lists made the latter half of the speech sound more like an interminable State of the Union address than a nomination acceptance.

And all of it was delivered in the slurring, monotonous drone that Trump adopts whenever he's reined in by written remarks on a teleprompter. Throughout the second half of the address, you feel him breaking away from the script for a word here, a phrase there, like he was dying to turn the occasion into one of his vulgarity- and mockery-infused campaign rallies where he riffs for 90 minutes about his enemies.

Or maybe he was just trying to keep himself awake. I know the feeling. Damon Linker

A Delaware News Journal reporter captured a powerful, private moment on Wednesday as Joe Biden gave his first address as president of the United States. "Poignant moment," the reporter, Patricia Talorico, captioned the photo, which swiftly went viral. "While Joe Biden gave his inauguration speech, a lone man in a uniform knelt at the Delaware grave of his son Beau."

As Talorico explained in a subsequent article, "Delaware is a tiny state." She described how back in 2002, when she was struggling with an assignment from her editor, Beau Biden approached her to ask if she was okay while she sat alone on a bench at an elementary school in Wilmington. "He wasn't in office at the time," she wrote. "He was just being kind. It wasn't a grand gesture, just a small one, but somehow, it made a difference that day. I never forgot that act of kindness."

On Wednesday, Beau — who died of a brain tumor in 2015 at the age of 46 — was on Talorico's mind, and she decided to drive by his grave to say "a short prayer" when she saw "a lone man in a blue uniform kneeling at Beau's grave. No one else was around … In my car, I had the radio tuned to CNN. Joe Biden was being sworn in as president and was about to begin his address."

As Talorico writes, "The journalist in me wanted to go back and find out [the man's] identity and ask why he was there. The person who once received a kind gesture from Beau when I needed it most knew it was a time to be respectful, and I drove away." Read her full story at Delaware News Journal. Jeva Lange

President Biden has entered the Oval Office — and has immediately started undoing former President Donald Trump's legacy.

After his inauguration Wednesday, Biden made his way into the White House for the first time as president, and found what he called a "very generous letter" Trump had left there for him. And after sitting down at the Resolute Desk, Biden signed a wave of executive orders overturning Trump's policies and installing others the former president would've opposed.

For starters, Biden instituted a mask mandate on all federal property across the U.S. Biden can't force Americans to wear masks everywhere — that's up to governors — but he does have jurisdiction over any federal government-owned property. He also stopped Trump's planned withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which Trump criticized for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and started the process of putting the federal government in charge of vaccine and testing coordination.

The U.S. had also just withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord after Trump moved to step away from it years ago. But Biden's executive order signed Wednesday put the U.S. on track to rejoining it. Another order also temporarily banned oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and halted construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

After four years of Trump's hardline immigration policies, and seemingly in an attempt to counter the Obama administration's immigration legacy, Biden quickly took action on immigration as well. He signed orders reversing Trump's Muslim travel ban and stopping construction of the southern border wall, and plans to bring a massive immigration reform bill to Congress on Wednesday. Kathryn Krawczyk

The Democratic Party gained a slim majority in the Senate on Wednesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris — who just a few hours earlier took her own oath of office — swore Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), and her successor Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) into the upper chamber.

The Senate now has a 50-50 party split, though Harris would serve as the tie-breaker in simple majority votes, which means the Democrats hold the edge.

With the addition of three new Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has taken on the role of majority leader, while Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is once again the minority leader, a post he held between 2007 and 2015. Tim O'Donnell

Liberal Fox News contributor Richard Fowler choked up during an appearance on the network as he marveled at the numerous glass ceilings broken by Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

"One part [of the inauguration] that caused me to get real emotional was, we've been a country for 243 years, and in all those 243 years, we have had women citizens but we have never had a woman hold national office," Fowler said, his voice breaking as he went on. "So to see Kamala Harris put her hand on the Bible today — also being her and I are of Jamaican descent, and I just think about my grandmother and my mom and so many other women who saw this, and so many young girls who can finally believe that they can be president, too, because of what we did as a country back in November."

Fowler was not the only contributor on Fox News on Wednesday to be audibly moved by the significance of Harris' oath. Political analyst Juan Williams also emotionally explained, "It's visceral, and I'll tell you why. I have granddaughters, I'm the son of a Black mother — you think about American history, you think about the status of Black women in this country for most of our history. And the idea that a Black woman would assume such power in this moment as a national leader — truly inspiring." Jeva Lange

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn into office Wednesday, marking the end of former President Donald Trump's term. After the inauguration ceremony, Biden and Harris embarked on a short parade around the Capitol Hill area that ended at the White House. That's where Biden and his family got to step inside for the first time since Biden was vice president four years ago.

Shortly after Biden's arrival, Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff made it to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The vice president has a set of offices in the building next to the White House, but lives in a house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory about two miles northwest.

The White House got a thorough cleaning after the Trump administration departed Wednesday morning. Biden administration members will be required to wear masks once they start working, unlike Trump's staff. Kathryn Krawczyk

President Biden's team is reportedly worried the COVID-19 pandemic they're inheriting will be even more difficult to handle than they anticipated, and some advisers say a new, more contagious variant of the virus — as opposed to vaccine distribution logistics — is the main reason why, Bloomberg reports.

Biden has promised to work to curb the virus' spread with a push to inoculate 100 million Americans in 100 days. He plans to encourage widespread mask usage, increase testing, and safely reopen schools. But the fear is that the new variant, which was initially discovered in the United Kingdom, but has made its way to the U.S. and elsewhere, will upend the entire plan and subsequently damage his prospects of achieving other legislative priorities like immigration reform and infrastructure development, Bloomberg notes.

While the mutation is seemingly at the center of the apprehension, Biden's aides also reportedly blame their predecessors for putting them in a bad spot. Some aides, per Bloomberg, privately allege the Trump administration "dragged its heels in showing them details of the federal response and its data." Ultimately, they reportedly opted against making those concerns public because they wanted to avoid publicly criticizing the Trump administration during the transition, potentially motivating them to cut them out of the loop completely.

A former senior Trump official told Bloomberg that description of the situation was just the Biden team's way of lowering expectations, adding that they were given unprecedented access to pandemic-related information. Read more at Bloomberg. Tim O'Donnell