Writing a speech for Biden can be hell. And that was before the inaugural.

POLITICO Dispatch: January 20 Streets are deserted. Stores are boarded up. Troops line the perimeter of the Capitol. This is the backdrop of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Longtime aides and advisers expect the inaugural address to traverse territory that Biden has covered over the course of his nearly 50-year public career, while highlighting an agenda that offers up hope to a country ravaged by disease, economic struggles, and violent political insurrection.

While the process behind developing Biden’s speeches can be grueling (one longtime adviser jokingly suggested creating a support group for Biden speech writers), there is a method to it. Biden has maintained a core team of loyal advisers around him who have grown to learn how to parse when the president-elect is just riffing and when he really wants his thoughts committed to paper.

Biden has grown comfortable with chief speech writer Vinay Reddy and senior adviser Mike Donilon, who have helped him thread his narratives in a simple, grounded way. The president-elect has also leaned on Tony Blinken, his secretary of state designate, to help with the speech writing process. Incoming chief of staff Ron Klain is in the mix as well.

For his speeches, Biden receives advice — solicited and unsolicited — from a wide cast of luminaries, which in the past has included historian Jon Meacham. It was not entirely clear among aides if Meacham contributed to the drafting of the inauguration speech, though a source familiar with the process said he had consulted on the process.

“I do know there is a lot of attention going toward the speech,” said Democratic National Committee Finance Chair Chris Korge. “He’s going to turn the page and move forward for all Americans.”

The inaugural address will be Biden’s biggest audience since he delivered an acceptance speech on Nov. 7. It will be the most high-stakes speech since the one he delivered at the August Democratic National Convention, when disinformation was raging about his mental acuity. Biden’s team at the time said they were prepared for Republicans — namely President Donald Trump — to seize on any phrase Biden garbled.

“People were nervous,” said a confidant who spoke with Biden in the days before the convention speech, which was delivered from Wilmington, Del. “But Joe had labored over it and at one point, he said, ‘I'm going to make the ancestors proud. I’m going to make mom and dad proud.'”

Cedric Richmond, the Louisiana congressman who just stepped down to take a senior role in the Biden White House, said now, just like in August, people failed to give Biden due credit.

“People have always underestimated his ability to rise to a challenge,” said Richmond. “No matter what, he’s always risen to the occasion.”

Biden will speak at a time when there is a show of force in the nation’s capital, with the center of the district shuttered to the public and thousands of armed troops roaming the streets to stave off the kind of deadly unrest that unfolded inside the Capitol building on Jan. 6.

But Matt Teper, who worked as a speechwriter for Biden in the Obama White House, predicted Biden would spend little to no time talking about Trump specifically.

“The most important thing tomorrow is probably his tone,” Teper said. “American carnage [the theme of Trump’s inaugural address] keeps coming up in every conversation, but nobody wants to hear that. He needs to give people a sense of looking forward. There’s a president in charge right now. As long as he projects all that, then that’s a success.”

Christopher Cadelago and Marc Caputo contributed to this report.