Trump agrees to start Biden transition
Washington D.C. blossomed with some rare good news Tuesday as President Donald J. Trump agreed to begin transition as a key agency called Biden the apparent election winner.
The green light came from the General Services Administration which declared that Joseph Biden voters had topped the race against Trump.
The GSA said on Monday that it had determined that Biden was the winner of the Nov. 3 U.S. election.
Trump said on Twitter he had directed his team to cooperate on the transition, but vowed to continue fighting the election results, despite a lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Emily Murphy, who heads the General Services Administration, said she made the determination based on “the law” and “facts.”
After Murphy’s letter was made public, Trump tweeted, “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.”
Yohannes Abraham, executive director of the Biden transition, said in a statement Monday that the move by GSA “is a needed step to begin tackling the challenges facing our nation, including getting the pandemic under control and our economy back on track.”
On Tuesday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 30,000 for the first time, Trump emerged to take a victory lap. The president said “That is a sacred number. He has long fixated on the stock market as the barometer of his administration’s economic performance. “Nobody thought they’d ever see it.”
The index stayed above the 30,000 mark for much of the day — up more than 450 points over the previous day.
“I’m very thrilled with what has happened on the vaccine front,” Trump said, with Vice President Mike Pence by his side. “That’s been absolutely incredible.”
The appearance was not on the president’s schedule until moments before he showed up, and Trump took no questions from the press before exiting the room. Reporters estimated that the brief talk was done in under a minute.
Later in the afternoon, Trump held the annual turkey-pardoning ceremony, a typically lighthearted event the president has seemingly reveled in over his prior three years in office.