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(CNN) – Joe Biden will be president in 30 days. Until then, the question is how much damage a vindictive and delusional next ex-president who devours conspiracy theories can do, whose wild undemocratic instincts are being encouraged by fringe political opportunists.
Donald Trump will retain the astonishing powers of the presidency until noon on January 20, and there has never been a time when he has been subjected to so few restrictive influences or had a greater incentive to cause disruption.
The president spends day after day in his White House bunker, pondering wild theories about imposing martial law, taking over the voting machines and staging an intervention in Congress on January 6 to steal the election from Biden.
Surrounded by the last dead loyalists, Trump spews lies and political venom like King Lear into a crumbling Twitter kingdom, alarming some employees about what he will do next.
On Monday, he met with a clique of Republican lawmakers who plan to contest the election on unsubstantiated claims of fraud in a special session of Congress to ratify the results on January 6.
Two Ways Trump Can Still Hurt America
Trump may do more damage to America in the coming days in two ways: by aggressive design and by his passive neglect of his obligation to lead.
His attempts to crush American democratic traditions by claiming a landslide victory in an election that he lost and was not particularly tight fits into the first category. The president’s behavior has sown great mistrust in the fundamental underpinning of the United States political system, fair elections, among millions of his voters and threatens to compromise the legitimacy of the Biden White House.
Trump’s indifference to the multiple crises caused by his administration constitutes the second category of his political vandalism. This includes their apathy over a raging pandemic that has infected 18 million Americans and killed nearly 320,000 as a grieving nation lives through its darkest holiday season in generations.
There is no substitute in the United States system of government for the participation of a president during a large-scale national enterprise. But there is also no indication that Trump cares about offering the leadership to ensure the success of the gigantic vaccination program that offers hope of ending the pandemic. This after his denial of the virulence of Covid-19 undoubtedly made the death toll worse.
Trump is also interfering for Russia, prioritizing the interests of an adversary over those of the United States after a massive cyber attack attributed to the Kremlin.
These infractions are in addition to the abandonment of presidential duty on a large scale. It is impossible to imagine any other president of the modern era behaving in this way or that any of the political parties tolerated his abuse of power. The negligence of former President George W. Bush during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 seems normal by comparison.
The current president’s undemocratic behavior since the elections is validating the fears of critics, and more than 80 million Biden voters, who were concerned about his unbridled behavior in a second term. Like many strongmen going out, his outrageous demeanor is growing more unhinged as the prospect of losing power becomes tangible.
Wild plans
Even Trump’s White House staff are concerned about what will happen next, at a time when Washington is already primed for a wave of presidential pardons for political interests or questionable legality in the coming weeks.
“No one is sure where this is going,” an official told CNN’s staff at the White House on Monday, in a disturbing behind-the-scenes look at the chaos unfolding in the West Wing. “He remains the president for another month.”
The wild plans of some of Trump’s acolytes, such as retired General Michael Flynn’s discussed plan to send troops to contested states to reissue the elections in which the president has already lost, have no chance of working. Even if Trump’s renegades had the competence to mount such a threat, the courts have shown zero tolerance for the president’s autocratic attempts to destroy American democracy. It is unthinkable that the military would deploy to reverse a popular vote on American soil.
Trump’s extremism is also unfolding in the context of a landmark election after which the safety valves of the courts, electoral safeguards in the states, and eventually parts of the Capitol, stood firm in defense of democracy.
But the fact that a defeated president even hears theories about imposing martial law in the Oval Office is incomprehensible in the world’s oldest and most influential democracy.
If it weren’t for the scandalous attacks on the rule of law over the past four years and the evidence of a presidency tied to Trump’s erratic persona, this would not be credible at all.
The rest of the world is seeing all this. It just makes people wonder. What’s going on in America? ”An incredulous John Kasich, former Republican governor of Ohio, said Monday on CNN’s“ The Situation Room. ”
Trump’s loss of composure is serious enough from a domestic point of view. But it sends a signal to America’s adversaries of a leadership vacuum. His bizarre refusal to endorse his administration’s assessment that Russia is behind the cyber attack suggests there is a 30-day window of impunity for enemies dedicated to tarnishing America’s national interests. The idea of an agitated and emotional president in the face of a sudden foreign policy crisis is not comforting.
Barr breaks up with the president
The extreme nature of the collapse of Trump’s final days is best summed up by the fact that Attorney General William Barr, who had accommodated many of the president’s political attacks on the spirit of the law, broke widely with Trump as he prepares. to leave office before Christmas.
Barr said Monday that he saw no need to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the baseless allegations of voter fraud. It came to a similar conclusion about Trump’s demands for an investigation into Biden’s son Hunter, who is already the subject of a criminal investigation into his businesses. At his farewell press conference on Monday, Barr said he saw no reason for the federal government to take over the voting machines, a move advocated by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani. And he said the massive cyber meddling in the US government “certainly appears to be from the Russians.”
Although Trump’s most fervent loyalists have turned against him for his political apostasy toward the president, Barr remains a credible figure among many Senate Republicans, and his comments will have bolstered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s effort to stop any of his groups seeking to mount a futile challenge to the election during a joint session of Congress to ratify the result on January 6.
But Barr is leaving in a few days, potentially allowing the president to lean on Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who will face a tense weeks at the helm of the department before Biden’s inauguration. If he refuses to give in to the will of the president, it is not impossible that Trump can fire him and seek a willing accomplice for his attacks on the rule of law, emulating President Richard Nixon in the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973.
In an ominous sign for days to come, Trump told young conservative voters in Georgia on the phone Monday that “we won this overwhelmingly” and that he needed “the backing of the … Department of Justice and others to finally give. a step forward”.
Plotting a stunt in Congress
Monday’s meeting between Trump and Republican lawmakers was the latest troubling sign that he’s prepared to tear down the integrity of America’s electoral system by walking out the Oval Office door.
The group is preparing to “fight the growing evidence of voter fraud. Stay tuned, ”White House Secretary General Mark Meadows tweeted, breathing new life into falsehoods widely discredited by the Supreme Court, various judges and Republican state election officials since the election.
The effort will not succeed in invalidating Biden’s election as Democrats control the House of Representatives and there is no indication that the Republican majority in the Senate, most of whom now acknowledge that Biden is president-elect, will follow suit. . But pro-Trump lawmakers can pull off a trick that would make a mockery of democracy and further sow distrust in America’s political system among fervent supporters of the president, a scenario that could cause years of damage.
Fringe figures around Trump, in addition to Giuliani and Flynn, include Sidney Powell, the lawyer who just weeks ago was expelled from her legal team for her bizarre claims of a large-scale international plot involving the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez , China, the Democrats and the Clintons to steal the election.
Trump has raised the idea of incorporating Powell as a special counsel within the White House Office of the General Counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The current attorney’s office has lobbied strongly against the idea, sources told CNN.
“There is a high level of concern with anything involving Sidney Powell,” a source close to the president told the CNN team at the White House.
Another of Trump’s fellow travelers in the conspiracies, populist guru Steve Bannon, and hardline business adviser Peter Navarro also have the president’s attention, sources told CNN.
“I think we are seeing how desperate Trump is getting. And how desperate the last remaining rats on the ship are becoming, so to speak, because of that, “said Lawrence Wilkerson, former senior adviser to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, on CNN’s” OutFront “Monday.
