Lessons from a non-concession
The defeated Sen. Stephen Douglas telling Presidentelect Abraham Lincoln on the brink of the Civil War, “I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you”; William Jennings Bryan congratulating William McKinley with a telegram noting that the will of the American people “is law”; John McCain recognizing fellow Sen. Barack Obama as having “achieved a great thing for himself and for this country.”
President Trump’s concession to Joe Biden will not go down among those and other great concessions in American history — not least because he has not offered one.
More than two weeks after Biden’s victory became clear, Trump refuses to follow a noble tradition dating to the century before the last. So it fell to an obscure federal bureaucrat to let the official transition proceed.
Emily Murphy, the head of the procurement and real estate agency known as the General Services Administration, was not supposed to be the one to concede this election, and it showed. Like too many Republican lawmakers, Murphy spent weeks deferring to the Trump campaign’s imaginary legal and political case against Biden’s election, blocking the funding, briefings and other statutorily prescribed aspects of the peaceful transfer of power.
Murphy relented this week while complaining that the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 offered her little guidance on how to fulfill her procedural duty to facilitate the transition while the president was failing in his political duty to concede to it. It was in that respect part of a fitting conclusion to a presidency that has revealed the extent to which the nation and its government depend not just on laws but also on unwritten but long observed customs. Even in defeat, Trump provides another warning that we can no longer rely on common decency to guide our leaders and that the most basic standards of behavior may have to be codified in law.
Biden has already signaled that this departure into dysfunction is almost over for the time being. Although Trump has doubted and diminished his clear popular and electoral victory, Biden has shown appropriate restraint and focus, appearing far more presidential than the president.
The presidentelect’s early appointments have been similarly encouraging. His reported choice for Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, headed the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank and served as Fed chairwoman until her arbitrary and precedent breaking ouster by Trump. Her experience and longstanding focus on employment should reassure an economy shaken by a mismanaged pandemic. That’s in marked contrast to the latest machinations of Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who has moved to restrict federal emergency lending, undermining confidence at an inopportune moment and unnecessarily complicating the work of his successors.
Biden also plans to nominate longtime foreign policy adviser Antony Blinken as secretary of state and elevate career diplomat Linda Thomas Greenfield to the Cabinet as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, signaling a return to international engagement and leadership. The appointments offer another contrast with a president who was impeached based partly on the disturbing testimony of sidelined Foreign Service veterans.
But the presidentelect will have to go beyond a welcome restoration of order, competence and principle in the upper ranks of the administration to successfully repair the damage wrought by the once and would be forever president. He will also have to ensure that our laws and institutions are stronger in the face of the next such assault.