Transition starting but Trump not conceding
Nicholas Khoo looks at why Donald Trump is challenging the US presidential election results.
WASHINGTON: After weeks of waiting, President Donald Trump’s Administration yesterday cleared the way for presidentelect Joe Biden to transition to the White House, giving him access to briefings and funding — even as Trump vowed to continue fighting the election results.
Trump, a Republican, has alleged widespread voter fraud in the November 3 election without providing evidence. Although he did not concede or acknowledge his Democratic rival’s victory yesterday, Trump’s announcement that his staff would cooperate with Biden’s represented a significant shift and was the closest he had come to admitting defeat.
Biden won 306 statebystate electoral votes, well over the 270 needed for victory, to Trump’s 232. Biden also holds a lead of more than 6 million in the national popular vote.
The Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the election have almost entirely failed in key battleground states, and a growing number of Republican leaders, business executives and national security experts had been urging the president to let the transition begin.
The presidentelect has begun naming members of his team, including tapping trusted aide Antony Blinken to head the State Department, without waiting for government funding or a Trump concession. Critics have accused the president of undermining US democracy and undercutting the next administration’s ability to fight the Covid19 pandemic with his refusal to accept the results.
Yesterday, the General Services Administration, the federal agency that must sign off on presidential transitions, told Biden he could formally begin the handover process. GSA administrator Emily Murphy said in a letter that Biden would get access to resources that had been denied to him because of the legal challenges seeking to overturn his win.
That means Biden’s team will now have federal funds and an official office to conduct his transition until he takes office on January 20. It also paves the way for Biden and Vicepresidentelect Kamala Harris to receive regular national security briefings that Trump also gets.
The GSA announcement came shortly after Michigan officials certified Biden as the victor in their state, making Trump’s legal efforts to change the election outcome even more unlikely to succeed.
Trump and his advisers said he would continue to pursue legal avenues but his decision to give
Murphy the goahead to proceed with a transition for Biden’s administration indicated even the White House understood it was getting close to time to move on.
‘‘Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good . . . fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same,’’ Trump said on Twitter.
A Trump adviser said the president’s statement was not to be taken as a concession. — Reuters
RATHER than cut his losses, United States President Donald Trump is doubling down and insisting that he has won the 2020 presidential elections.
Even as Trump’s own election officials have declared the election ‘‘the most secure in history,’’ his legal and political proxies have launched court challenges to the voting process in several states.
Leading these efforts to delegitimise the election results are Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and Trump’s personal lawyer, and Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Meanwhile, the escalating Covid19 pandemic claims more lives. The United States has now registered an astounding 250,000 deaths.
How can we best explain Trump’s actions?
Any explanation for why Trump is challenging the election results has to start with an assumption of whether he is rational or irrational.
Irrational explanations would include the view that Trump is acting emotionally, retaliating out of anger at his election loss.
It could also include any variant of the conspiracy theories that pitch Trump as defending the US political system from a hostile takeover by nefarious sources.
The biggest problem with these explanations is that for them to hold up, we have to either assume that Trump is acting against his own interests, or that he is the protagonist in an implausible plot against what is arguably the most powerful state in world history.
A more convincing way to understand Trump is from a rational, interestbased perspective.
This perspective assumes that Trump has a basic understanding of the costs and benefits of his options, and that he is selecting an approach that maximises his benefits while minimising his costs.
In other words, Trump knows exactly what he is doing.
There are at least two interestbased approaches that Trump could have adopted in response to his election loss.
The first would have been for him to gracefully accept that he lost the election, assist in a swift transition to a Biden presidency, and thereby build up his political capital to fight another day.
Trump could then serve as the Republican Presidential candidate in 2024. Or, he could be the ‘kingmaker’ who determines which Republican Party politician continues the Trump effort to ‘Make America Great Again’.
It could be plausibly argued that such a strategy nicely combines Trump’s personal interests with the country’s national interest.
Trump has rejected such an approach.
Instead, he has adopted an alternative strategy which focuses on his personal interests, with little regard for the national interest as it is conventionally understood.
Trump’s actions during the 2020 election year, which include refusing to coordinate a national coronavirus strategy, and contesting the presidential election results, reflect the belief that such a disruptive antidemocratic posture either does not hurt him, or even maximises his personal interests.
What are his personal interests in continuing the campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election results?
These include Trump setting himself up for a postelection career disputing the 2020 election results, and establishing a policy grievance on which any of his highprofile children can use to seek public office in the future.
It may also be that Trump plans to paint any future legal prosecution for his many alleged prepresidency financial improprieties as evidence of a ‘deep state’ campaign targeting him for his refusal to accept the 2020 presidential election results.
For Trump’s strategy to work, the Republican Party must cooperate.
By keeping their heads down, the vast majority of Republicans in both the Senate and the House of Representatives are in effect choosing to support Trump.
The costs to the United States of this remarkable development are significant.
At least three can be identified.
First, it forestalls a more effective response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.
Second, it taints the election result by perpetuating the falsehood that Joe Biden lost, enraging a substantial bloc of Republican voters. This perpetuates the dysfunction in the United States’ political system, further diminishing the credibility of liberal democracy as an example to other countries.
Third, it heightens the appeal of the political stability and economic growth model provided by authoritarian rivals to the United States, notably China.
The argument that Trump is looking out for his own interests might seem an unexceptional argument. But we live in exceptional times, where conspiracy theories abound and the obvious needs to be explained, cogently and succinctly.
Trump’s decision to continue challenging the elections results is unprecedented. It reflects the reality that the United States is deeply divided and has never had a president like him.
And, in challenging the election results, Trump may be many things, but he is not irrational and knows exactly what he is doing.