How
to Defend Against a Lame-Duck Trump
Four
risks to guard against now
OCTOBER 19, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
The polls
are grim for President Donald Trump. His campaign faces a big and worsening
money disadvantage. His closing arguments appeal only to the most
hyper-partisan Republicans.
Many have
worried about the transition after a Trump electoral defeat. Will Trump leave
office quietly and peacefully? But there are other, less dramatic dangers to
ponder, too—dangers that we would do well to anticipate and guard against.
Funding
the government
The resolution funding the federal government expires December 11. If it is not renewed, the U.S. government will shut down, as it did for 35 days in December 2018 and January 2019, the longest shutdown in U.S. history. That shutdown badly hurt the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Fortunately,
the economy was strong enough in 2018–19 to absorb the shock. But things are
different in 2020–21. A pandemic is raging, unemployment has surged in its
wake, and President Trump, nursing a wounded ego, may be in a vengeful mood.
To make
things worse, the new Congress will not be seated until January 3. The outgoing
Senate majority may therefore feel it has a limited amount of time to impose
its priorities on an incoming Biden administration. It may feel it has little
to lose, and something to gain, by working with Trump to force its will while
it can.
A
self-pardon crisis
After his
presidency, Trump will face a large number of legal hazards. Most of them
involve state law, but some will be federal, especially credible allegations of
tax fraud. Trump has asserted a right to pardon himself. Many
legal scholars disagree. But the question has never been tested in court over
the long history of the U.S. presidency, and who knows what a John Roberts–led
Supreme Court majority reinforced by Amy Coney Barrett will think of the
matter? Trump seems likely to try the pardon—and in doing so might plunge the
nation into convulsion.
Making
things more complicated is the uncertainty about what a president can
pardon for. The IRS has the power to forgive all or part of a taxpayer’s liability. Can a
president direct the IRS to forgive his own debt? That question has never
arisen. It may arise now.
Last call
at Mar-a-Lago
As of
mid-September, The Washington Post has identified about $1.1 million of government
funds directly paid to Trump enterprises over the course of 274 presidential
visits to Trump properties. This estimate is certainly low. The State
Department, for example, has declined to make its records of spending at
Trump properties available until after the election. And the estimate is
dwarfed by the sums Trump has collected from Republican candidates and
Republican Party funds, as well as from domestic and foreign favor-seekers. But
the flow from taxpayers is the money most directly under his control—and the
easiest for him to accelerate, should his presidency near its end.
There are
about 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Trump could spend
every single day of them at Mar-a-Lago, enriching himself at taxpayer expense
to the end.
A final
round of legal abuses
Trump
never realized his fantasy of locking up his political opponents, and now it
seems he never will. But there is one last service his politicized attorney
general can do for him before returning to whatever law firm will have him—and
that is dirtying those opponents on the way out the door.
As Trump
leaves office, actions he kept secret will become public. His reputation,
already bad, will sink even further into the muck. His one and only defense is
to try to paint everybody else as just as dirty as he is.
His hopes
for the future—starting with staying out of prison—depend on transforming the
remains of the Republican Party into an ongoing Trump Defense League, like
those bogus anti-defamation groups stepped up by New York City mobsters in the
1970s. And the surest way to achieve that end is by empowering
the QAnon fantasy to become a power bloc inside the Republican Party. In the original QAnon myth, Trump was a messiah
battling a demonic “deep state.” Now he’ll be reimagined as a martyr instead—or
perhaps as a messiah awaiting a second coming. The more Trump can propagate
wild claims during his lame-duck presidency, the tighter he can bolt the
conservative messaging machine to his cause during his post-presidency.
After his
bankruptcies in the late 1980s, Trump extolled his “art of the comeback” in a
1997 book. Nearing age 75, and after repudiation at the polls, he is unlikely
to have any comeback awaiting him. But he can at least work for the
gratification of his vindictiveness, inflicting a final act of retaliation
against the nation he will now hate, just as a narcissist always hates those
who escape his domination and control.