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By The Washington Post 
8h ago
By Dan Balz
It has been almost three weeks since President Donald Trump took a lectern at the White House in the early hours of November 4 to declare that the election was being stolen. It was an invention designed to make President-elect Joe Biden an illegitimate president and has continued apace ever since. It won’t stop with Biden’s swearing-in on January 20.
Any ideas Trump might have had about repealing the election was a failed venture from the start. Those hopes took a double hit on Friday when Georgia’s secretary of state certified Biden as the winner there and Michigan Republican legislative leaders, after meeting with the president, signaled that they would do nothing to try to undermine the results. Biden has a majority in the electoral college and the certification process continues to gather steam.
Throughout these weeks, the president and his legal team have been unable to produce credible evidence of systematic or widespread fraud. Now they are turning to outlandish accusations of a grand conspiracy by Biden and the Democrats, charges repeatedly debunked. This effort is being led by Rudy Giuliani, who was once a renowned mayor of New York. These fraud reports are themselves a cynical and fraudulent company.
Judging from his actions, Trump appears to have a motive other than repealing the election. He is determined to paralyze the Biden presidency before it even becomes official. No defeated president has ever undertaken such a bold and undemocratic act. There are short-term and long-term consequences that could profoundly affect Biden’s ability to govern.
Trump has put immediate obstacles to Biden’s transition. Without official verification from Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, Biden and his team have been denied the necessary funding for the transition and access to the government departments and agencies they will soon inherit.
This is a petty effort on the part of the president to cover up what should be an orderly and non-partisan process. Even without the GSA seal of approval, Biden is pushing ahead with what experts say are the top priorities of the transition period: building a new government and outlining legislative priorities to get off to a quick start in office.
Biden has already appointed many of his most important members of his staff to the White House, a set of critically important decisions that ensures he will have a team in place and up and running when he takes office. He’s also begun to make up his mind about his cabinet: Last week, Biden said he had chosen his secretary of the Treasury and will reveal that person, and perhaps other cabinet appointees, just before or after Thanksgiving. Thank you.
Access to agencies, while necessary, is not as crucial at this point, according to several people who have been through past transitions. They say the dozens of people on Biden’s agency transition teams have considerable knowledge of the federal bureaucracy and even their own networks within agencies to take advantage of, without an official start to the transition.
Biden has also been unable to receive classified intelligence reports, and even several Republicans say it is time for him to do so. But it’s not that Biden doesn’t know the world, its hot spots, and many of its leaders. Decades of experience give it a foundation that someone without that background, say Donald Trump four years ago, would not have. Not having these informational meetings isn’t ideal, but at the moment, it’s not a big setback.
There are two things currently blocked for Biden’s team that, however, could cause problems in the early days of his presidency. One is the lack of access to information about plans to distribute hundreds of millions of doses of a covid 19 vaccine. Bringing the vaccine to as many Americans as possible, and persuading as many Americans as possible to take it, will fall on Biden’s shoulders. The sooner your team gets through it, the better it will be for everyone.
A second problem is the lack of access to the FBI to begin the necessary background checks for senior positions, including cabinet nominees. The longer they delay, the more likely Biden will start his term with many Cabinet nominees awaiting confirmation, adding to the burden of new White House staff to lead the government.
That is the situation now. After the inauguration will come other problems for Biden when he begins to move his schedule. At this point, he doesn’t know if he will have a Senate in Democratic hands or still under Republican control and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. The answer to that awaits Georgia’s two January 5 runoff elections, in which Democrats must win to gain control.
The difference between having a 50-50 split, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris there to break any ties, and a Republican majority is huge. A former Obama administration official called it “the difference between having a transformative presidency versus having to negotiate everything with a Republican Senate.” Biden must prepare for any outcome.
There is no doubt that Biden’s first priority will be the coronavirus pandemic: establishing policies to contain the spread of the virus, increase production of personal protective equipment, establish a more reliable system for testing, and ensure rapid and efficient distribution of a vaccine. The other part of the pandemic agenda will be to provide economic relief to the many millions of Americans who are suffering, as well as the state and local governments whose budgets have been affected by their efforts to stop the disease.
Beyond that, Biden will have to prioritize among his various campaign promises: healthcare, weather, immigration, policing and racial justice. There are electoral districts within the Democratic Party for each of them.
Two questions arise: Will Trump seek to use his influence as the incumbent head of the Republican Party to pressure Republican lawmakers to screw up Biden’s priorities? Will Biden be forced to trim his sails, at the risk of an intra-party battle with the left, to seek even modest bipartisan support?
How Trump’s presidency ends will affect how Biden’s presidency begins.
Nathaniel Persily, an election expert and professor at Stanford University School of Law, said Republicans will not easily reduce the hostility engendered by their implicit acceptance of Trump’s claims of a stolen election. “You cannot consistently claim for several months that the president committed fraud and that he has a civil relationship regarding public policy,” he said.
Still, some analysts see the biggest threat to Biden’s presidency as the likelihood of a four-year effort to undermine the new administration, led by a vengeful Trump. He has always looked for scapegoats when things don’t go his way, and in this, the biggest setback of his life, he has made up the perfect excuse: they robbed him.
“I’m afraid that as a former president, Trump is going to maintain a steady pace … to try to clarify one point: that his election was stolen, that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and that this can only be resolved with the removal of Biden of office through an election and his replacement by Donald J. Trump, “said William Galston of the Brookings Institution.
This assault on the system, the government, the integrity of the elections, the institutions of democracy and the truth, means that Biden will take the oath of office and perhaps a third or more of the electorate will consider him illegitimate. No amount of courtship will attract them, however genuine Biden is in scope.
Biden has been careful so far, as he was during the campaign, not to get into a mud fight with the president. He has upheld his call for unity and expressed his determination to be a president that helps heal the country. You may not have a choice, even at the expense of progress in some of your programs.
Some Republicans have said “enough.” The loudest rebuke from the president comes from Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who made his point of view on Trump clear by voting to convict the president of an imputable crime during the Senate trial last winter. Most Republicans continue in silence or with indirect assent. Until that changes, until, say, McConnell says emphatically enough, Trump will be free to continue his destructive campaign to undermine a duly elected new president.
Before the election, Trump repeatedly refused to say that he would ensure a peaceful transition of power and it is now clear that he never intended to accept defeat. Persily compared the unfolding events to “the kind of thing you see in struggling democracies around the world, where large factions are unwilling to lay down their arms in the campaign.” This is the America Biden will inherit in just over eight weeks, with a former president in exile planning a possible return.
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