A
Victory for Democracy: Trump Allows the Transition to Begin
By John Cassidy
November 24, 2020
By Monday evening, it
must have been clear, even to Donald
Trump, that the jig was up. During the previous forty-eight hours,
the President’s campaign to overturn the 2020
election result and entrench himself in the White House for
another four years had suffered a series of heavy blows. This past weekend, in
yet another setback for his legal team, a conservative federal judge in
Pennsylvania mockingly dismissed a
voter-fraud case that had been filed days earlier. On Monday morning, more than
a hundred Republican national-security officials published a public letter calling
on Trump to “cease his anti-democratic assault on the integrity of the
presidential election.” And, on Monday afternoon, Michigan’s Board of State
Canvassers certified that Joe
Biden had won the state by more than a hundred and fifty
thousand votes.
Trump’s
legal options were shrinking away, his political support was crumbling, and
even some of his senior aides in the
White House were telling him that it was time for a formal transition to a
Biden Presidency. Finally, Trump gave in. In a letter to Biden that
was leaked to CNN and other media outlets, Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee who
heads the General Services Administration, an independent federal agency that,
among other duties, provides financing and other forms of support to
Presidential transitions, said that she was now ready “to make those resources
and services available.” Immediately after Murphy’s letter emerged, Trump sent
two tweets, in which he thanked her for
“steadfast dedication” and said, “Our case “STRONGLY continues, we will keep up
the good ... fight, and I believe we will prevail!” But then Trump went on, “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.”
Given
Trump’s chronic aversion to being labelled a loser, and his clear intention to
use the myth of a stolen election as a rallying cry for his supporters going
forward, this pair of tweets may well be the closest he ever comes to issuing a
formal concession. Indeed, later on Monday night, he said, in another tweet,
“Will never concede to fake ballots & ‘Dominion’.” (“Dominion” refers to
Dominion Voting Systems, a company that figures prominently in one of the
Trumpian conspiracy theories about the election.) But in an administrative
sense, the deed has been done. Trump’s tweets, together with Murphy’s letter,
marked an official acknowledgement that Biden is now the President-elect and,
as such, is entitled to all the perquisites that go with that status. The flip
side of this recognition went unacknowledged by the White House, but it can no
longer be denied: Trump is officially a lame duck.
Trump’s
anti-democratic assault—it was refreshing to see even some Republicans using
such plain language—isn’t over. In the days and weeks ahead, Rudy Giuliani and
his colleagues will go on with their madcap legal efforts. And Trump will
surely continue to insist that he won the election, probably to his dying day.
But the official start of the transition has turned all that into a sideshow.
For now, at least, the future belongs to the next President, who is already
busy rolling out his Cabinet appointments.
No
matter how you regard the specific prospect of a Biden Presidency, these
developments are excellent news for American democracy. Four years ago, I wrote a column about the threat that
Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton presented. While distancing myself from
some historians and political scientists who were then comparing the
President-elect to Hitler or Mussolini, I noted some of the serious dangers
that lay ahead: “If anything, the isolation and pressures of the Oval Office
might further warp his ego and exaggerate his dictatorial tendencies.
Surrounded by yes-men, he could well be tempted to try to expand his powers,
especially when things go wrong, as they inevitably do at some point in any
Presidency.”
I
was perhaps too optimistic. Faced with the prospect of losing office, Trump
has, for months, been waging a systematic campaign against the most basic
institution of democracy: the election. When protests erupted across the nation
following the police killing of George
Floyd, Trump whipped up racial divisions, incited his supporters to
violence, and sought to deploy active-duty troops on the streets of Washington,
D.C. As the election approached, he repeatedly claimed that it would be rigged
against him, and refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And, after
Americans turned out to vote in record numbers, he launched a desperate effort to
overturn the election result.
One
can argue about whether this effort amounted to a full-fledged attempt to stage a self-coup,
or autogolpe, or whether it was too botched and legalistic to merit
such a description. In any case, it was a disgraceful display of political
vandalism that has done considerable and lasting damage. If the polls are to be
believed—and one of the lessons of the election is that they should never be
entirely believed—a majority of Republicans support Trump’s claim
that the 2020 vote was crooked. And why wouldn’t they? “Republican senators and
representatives, in their silence, are allowing the idea to take hold that the
whole system is rigged,” Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, noted last Thursday,
in the Wall Street Journal. The fact that, this week, some elected
Republicans at the national level belatedly came forward and called on Trump to
allow the transition to begin doesn’t negate the abject servility that they
have displayed since the election—and, indeed, since the 2016 election.
The
American system of governance will take a long time to recover from Trump and
Trumpism, if it ever does. But this is a day to celebrate the good news. In the
past month, some of the key permanent institutions of U.S. democracy have
proved up to the task of resisting a series of grave challenges. (Set aside the
national Republican Party, which is now largely an appendage of Trump.) In the
midst of a terrible pandemic, the much-maligned U.S. voting system was
adaptable enough, and robust enough, to handle a record turnout of more
than a hundred and fifty-six million people. When Trump challenged the election
results, the localized and patchwork nature of the voting system proved to be
an advantage. With even Republican-run states, such as Georgia, zealously
guarding their authority to conduct the election and the vote count, Trump and
his lawyers were forced to fight on many different fronts—and practically
everywhere they ran into resistance from local election officials and the
courts.
The
Trump legal team endured many setbacks, but none was so humiliating as the
ruling issued, on Saturday, by Matthew Brann, a judge of the Middle District of
Pennsylvania, who rejected the Trump campaign’s last-ditch effort to block the
certification of that state’s results. The Trump complaint “like Frankenstein’s
monster, has been haphazardly stitched together,” Brann noted. It contained
“speculative accusations” that were “unsupported by evidence.” Brann is no
leftist: Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, subsequently described him as a
“longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased
jurist.” Brann was a jurist who, in this case, went on to say, “In the United
States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single
voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people,
laws and institutions demand more.”
As
the election was free, fair, and decisive, Trump and Giuliani can’t supply
more, of course. From the start, they have been recklessly promoting a farrago
of lies, irrelevancies, and half-truths. So far, at least, the people, laws,
and institutions that Brann referred to have proved strong enough to prevail
over this malign project. In this holiday week, the country still faces a lot
of grave challenges. But its resilience is something to give thanks for.
