Joe Biden delivered a thoughtful and necessary inaugural address as he assumed the presidency on Jan. 20, calling on Americans to bury their grievances, can their outrage, and unify.

Problem: America doesn’t want to unify, and it may in fact be impossible to unify.

Two weeks after rioters egged on by President Trump ransacked the U.S. Capitol, Biden acknowledged the fraught political environment he’s stepping into amid pandemic, insurrection and economic crisis. “Much to repair,” he said. “Much to restore. Much to heal. Much to build.”

As he did as a candidate, Biden laid out his overarching goal of restoring order and calm after the vitriolic years of the Trump presidency: “My whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause.”

Biden has the temperament to be a unifying force in Washington, with many deep friendships in both parties and an affable personality resistant to grudges. He won’t be attacking everybody who disagrees with him or criticizes him, as Trump did. And it’s important to start his term with a civil tone that might calm frayed nerves in many corners of the country.

But come on. The United States is deeply divided for reasons that go far beyond Trump, and much of it involves willful self-deception by Americans clinging to illusions they prefer over reality. Biden can’t change that and it would be a waste of effort to try.

For starters, around two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents believe the lie that Trump won the election. That’s more than 40 million Americans, or about one-seventh of the U.S. population. If those dead-enders don’t want to believe the ample evidence of Biden’s election win, there’s nothing Biden will be able to do to “unify” them. They want to exist on the political fringe.

Much of that alienation afflicts working-class whites—the core of Trump’s base—who feel the country is moving on without them. This is a decades-long trend in which globalization and digitization devalue manual labor, with no easy alternatives for blue-collar workers seeing jobs disappear and living standards fall. Biden does have some plans to address the root problems, but they’re entrenched and it would be foolish to expect much progress in two or three or four years.

Political culture warriors like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and much of the right-wing media will keep stoking these resentments, giving voters bogus bogeymen to blame their problems on and facile solutions like banning immigration or keeping trans folks out of restrooms. It’s obviously lucrative business for the likes of Fox News, and there’s a long line of cynical Republicans hoping to inherit Trump voters. Trump himself will no doubt return as some sort of sith culture lord.