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(CNN) – Even with President Donald Trump still refusing to grant the election, President-elect Joe Biden will launch an aggressive plan on Monday to control the pandemic that is escalating at an alarming rate and will define his administration as soon as he takes office.
Biden’s announcement from a coronavirus task force is an acknowledgment of the record numbers of new infections in recent days, meaning the covid-19 crisis will be much worse when it hits the Oval Office in January.
The initiative is a strong declaration of intent and makes clear that Biden will use an active transition period to mobilize against the staggering health and economic challenges he will face. And he indicates that he is already advancing in the task of assuming power after celebrating on Saturday the achievement of his three decades of search for the presidency.
His steps to set the tone for his administration come despite the unprecedented spectacle of a president who has lost the election by refusing to accept reality.
Sources tell CNN that Trump’s campaign advisers are considering their own aggressive strategy, not to finally confront the virus that has killed more than 237,000 Americans, but for the president to possibly hold rallies to reinforce his false claims that his second term has been stolen.
Trump shows no signs of responding to the worsening COVID-19 situation, which led to more than 100,000 new infections for five days in a row while Americans were obsessed with the prolonged recount of elections votes. On Saturday, the day the election results for Biden were announced, the highest total daily infections so far were recorded with 126,742 new cases.
Instead, the president remains locked in his haunted reality in which he won the election, despite Biden passing the 270 electoral votes needed to reach the White House, while making false claims that the presidency is being stolen from him.
But there have been signs of discord in Trump’s inner circle, after CNN reported that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, and first lady Melania Trump had advised him to accept defeat while his adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, you are pressuring him to continue a fight based on false claims of fraud. Kushner’s position grew murkier as the day progressed, and sources close to the president later told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Kushner was among those who lobbied Trump to hold rallies.
Trump’s intransigence and unsurprising challenge to democracy threaten to add a constitutional crisis and an interrupted transition of power to the country’s troubles as the Covid-19 crisis deepens and the economy languishes.
Many Republican leaders have refused to congratulate Biden, or even acknowledge his victory, demonstrating Trump’s great influence over his party. And the president’s lie about the outcome could convince many of the 70 million people who voted for him that the elections were truly corrupt and complicate Biden’s hopes of uniting the country.
But in a significant intervention Sunday, the only living Republican former president, George W. Bush, intervened after phoning Biden, saying in a statement that the election was “fundamentally fair” and the “result is clear.”
The president’s stubbornness is approaching a critical moment, however, with his attorneys under pressure to present compelling legal cases and produce genuine evidence of voter fraud, even as Biden’s advantage on the electoral map leaves only a slim chance of turning the tables. Outcome.
LEEWARD: ANALYSIS | What Joe Biden’s victory means to the world
Biden will face the ‘apex’ of the pandemic
Trump’s overwhelming concern for his own priorities, not surprising to anyone who has seen his presidency, remains notable given the rapidly worsening pandemic.
Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, said on CNN’s “Newsroom” Sunday that “by the time the Biden-Harris administration takes control, this virus will already have been rampant in American communities.” .
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, warned Sunday that by the time the president-elect is sworn in on January 20, the country will be on the “cusp” of the COVID-19 crisis and that the current administration – which has said the virus cannot be controlled – must act quickly.
«We have already passed the elections; I think they should focus on what we can do nationally, “Gottlieb said on CBS’s” Face the Nation. “
In the run-up to the election, the Trump White House, where coronavirus policy is led by Dr. Scott Atlas, who has scorned measures such as wearing masks, stopped informing Americans about a virus that the president He falsely said it would disappear. And he hasn’t sent a public health message for months. Vice President Mike Pence, who spent most of the last few weeks campaigning, will return to the White House Situation Room on Monday to lead a meeting of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force.
The inclusion of public health experts in the Biden coronavirus working group, which will be chaired by Dr. Vivek Murthy, former Director of Health, Dr. David Kessler, former FDA commissioner, and Dr. Marcella Núñez-Smith from Yale University, underscores how seriously the president-elect plans to confront the pandemic that will now surely dominate at least the first year of his term.
But the announcement will also reflect how, for the next 72 days, the new administration will be powerless to mitigate the course of the pandemic that in many ways will define Biden’s presidency and how Trump’s negligence will exacerbate the staggering challenges Biden will face once inside. of the Oval Office.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN that Biden’s plans to take the virus more seriously represent a “good start” and that he welcomed belated federal leadership on the pandemic after of the mismanagement of the Trump administration.
“The ship of the State has not had a captain,” Reiner said.
LEEWARD: President-elect Joe Biden sought to unite the nation in his victory speech. What challenges will you face?
Trump is in no mood to compromise
A day after Biden was projected to win the election, Trump went on as if nothing had happened, playing his second round of golf over the weekend and tweeting false claims that the election was rigged.
The president has yet to make the traditional call to the president-elect. Pence, who has been silent since Saturday, has yet to contact Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Several of Trump’s most vehement supporters in Washington backed up his unsubstantiated claims of fraud Sunday.
“What we need in the presidential race is to make sure that every legal vote is counted, that every recount is completed and that every legal challenge is heard,” said House of Representatives Top Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy. Recently re-elected South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that the president should not budge because the media should not announce the winner of the race.
“If they did, you would never have a Republican president in your life,” said Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Commission.
One of the president’s friends, Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” that he had spoken with the president this week and is “not interested in granting at this time.”
Trump’s apparent intention to continue to insist that he won the election may represent another occasion in which he is putting his own needs before a normal definition of the duties of his office.
In the likely event that your legal strategy fails, it could offer you a face-saving way to insist that you did not lose the election. It would also allow him to foster anger among his political base that he could use to remain a kingmaker in Republican politics after he leaves office.
But unless the president and his legal team can present evidence of a major fraud, which they have so far failed to accomplish, it may take a combination of family members and high-level Republicans to convince him that it’s over.
After CNN reported that the first lady believed it was time for the president to concede, she tweeted in support of her husband’s position.
“The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal vote, not illegal, must be counted. We must protect our democracy with full transparency, ”he tweeted.
LEEWARD: Jared Kushner and Melania Trump advise Trump to accept electoral defeat
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the 2012 defeated Republican presidential candidate and a frequent critic of Trump, called on Americans to rally behind Biden. He said he had seen no evidence of widespread fraud and predicted that Trump would eventually accept the inevitable once all legal remedies had been exhausted.
“Apparently, the nature of President Trump is not going to change in these last days of his presidency. He is who he is. And he has a relatively relaxed relationship with the truth, “Romney said on” State of the Union. “
Don’t expect him to be quiet at night. This is not how it works.
