America is a real place filled with real people and there are a lot of us and we are very different in those moments where they capture that where they you know it's just this constant flow of faces and geographies and just beautiful

scenery and towns and buildings like it's just this really visceral reminder of like this is who we are it's not just our fights like there is more here that draws us together

then politics or what we're fighting about on Facebook today

this is Sarah and Beth your name to pantsuit politics the home of grace filled political conversations

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of pantsuit politics the first episode of pantsuit politics in the new Biden administration that how are you feeling

this beautiful as we're recording Thursday look this is my version of LFG like reading a bunch of executive orders and looking at legislation going to congress I'm in I'm in for all the nerdyness I'm in for the lifting of the weight of the tweets

I am excited and I don't even love everything that's being done right now but I'm really here for it because I feel like we are focused on governance again and out of the morass of just the constant drumbeat of culture wars and when president Biden said during his inaugural address let's make a fresh start I was like me I'm in take me to the fresh start I'm ready

all right so that's what we're going to do today with our fresh start we're going to talk about the end of the Trump administration the first section how it felt to watch him leave what it was like for him to be absent from the transfer of power and other thoughts

good by thoughts or a lot of thoughts and then in the next segment we're going to talk about the inauguration the beginning of the Biden administration especially the executive actions we're just going to we're just going to go all in with our big feelings on this big day

I'm I'm excited I'm excited

okay Beth when you woke up yesterday and you realize there were mere hours minutes moments left of the Trump administration how did you feel

I felt so weird yesterday morning it was almost like my body was nearing the end of an infection but not quite well I felt really sad for lots and lots of people people who served in the administration the president himself

all of us in different ways all of the people who were sitting and waiting for him to do something to make Joe Biden's inauguration not real I just felt this real sense of heaviness for people that I've honestly struggled to have good compassion for at moments so I was kind of happy to be sad and those bars of waiting for the president to fly away

I felt extremely disappointed that he wasn't attending the inauguration even though I think maybe it's ultimately helpful that he didn't attend the inauguration it just was a really hard thing to explain to my daughters

we talked about how John Adams did it and how John Quincy Adams did it and what if petty family that must have been and that helped a little bit

I just was really sitting in a complicated soup of recognizing where we are and how far we have to go

and I also felt really excited to watch Kamala Harris be sworn in and watch the inauguration proceed and I felt really attached to the country's history of this transfer of power even though we can't accurately say that it was peaceful this year

so a lot what about you?

I felt so excited the second I watched him walk out of the White House I felt like I had smiled in a deep way that I had not smiled for four years

truly just because for me it's becoming easier to detach my feelings from about him from how I felt about him as president

he was sworn in four years ago I made a purposeful choice not to witness his swearing in and I have never watched his swearing in

because as someone who has always really loved history and particularly the presidency and first ladies and felt like it was very special and sacred

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