AS
HIS BOGUS ELECTION-FRAUD CHARGES GO UP IN FLAMES, TRUMP GOES INTO HIDING
His already bleak hopes of mounting a
successful legal challenge to the election now in the hands of Rudy Giuliani,
the president has receded from public view. “It feels like bunker mentality,”
one official said.
BY ERIC LUTZ
NOVEMBER
18, 2020
Joe Biden has been busy since his election victory
earlier this month: He’s been putting together his
White House team, meeting with national security officials, business and labor leaders,
and unveiling plans to
address the various crises he’ll inherit in two months, including the rapidly
escalating coronavirus outbreak. He's been doing the work a president-elect
normally does during the transition process, even though this interregnum has
been anything but normal.
Still yet to concede to Biden, Donald
Trump and his allies are continuing to hold up his successor’s
transition team, putting America’s national security at risk and threatening to
complicate the rollout of the forthcoming COVID vaccine while his lawyer, Rudy
Giuliani, fights his hopeless legal battle against the election results. (It isn’t going great.) Giuliani, working his
first federal case in nearly two decades, wasn’t much sharper in court than he
was in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot the day the race was
called for Biden. His arguments—a tangle of easily disproved lies and
already-debunked conspiracy theories—seem exceedingly unlikely to succeed,
something he may be aware of himself. According to the Washington Post’s Robert
Costa, Giuliani has privately suggested his real strategy
isn’t so much to land a long-shot victory in court, but to push the fight to
Capitol Hill by getting officials in key states to refuse to certify the
results. GOP members of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, Michigan,
tried to do just that Tuesday, voting against certifying the election results
there, with one official saying she’d sign off on other jurisdictions but not
Detroit, a majority Black, Democratic-voting city. But after public outrage,
the board reversed course and
unanimously certified the results later that night.
With Giuliani losing his games of 3-D and
regular chess, Trump’s campaign and legal teams have reportedly been
thrown into disarray, with backstabbing and chaos and power struggles. Trump
himself, meanwhile, has been pretty much AWOL since he lost the election. He's
only made two public appearances—showing up late to Arlington National Cemetery
on November 11 to spend 10 minutes at a Veterans Day ceremony; remarks touting
recent progress on the COVID vaccine—since his despotic rant in the briefing
room of the White House on November 5, when he baselessly alleged a massive
voter fraud conspiracy was being perpetrated against him.
“It feels like bunker mentality,” an
administration official told CNN on
Tuesday. Indeed, the Trump White House these days has been more like Grey
Gardens, with the reclusive president emerging only to play golf at his nearby
Virginia club. Appearing to have largely abandoned his presidential duties, to
the extent he ever sought to fulfill them, Trump’s only activities of late have
been settling scores with insufficiently loyal officials—Chris Krebs,
the top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, became
the latest purge victim after
defending the integrity of the election—and wailing on and on about voter fraud
on Twitter, which has slapped a warning label on a majority of his posts in
recent days.
While his disinformation campaign may be
paying off (half of Republicans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released
Wednesday believe Trump won the election but that it was “rigged” against him),
even some of his allies seem to be getting tired of the act and appear ready to
give up the ghost. The Wall Street Journal editorial board on
Tuesday demanded he either
produce evidence to back up his claims of improprieties with voting machines or
shut up. Republicans not named Lindsey Graham gradually seem
to be acknowledging Biden as the president-elect,
and Politico reported Wednesday
that several GOP senators were spotted fist-bumping Kamala Harris in
apparent recognition of her imminent ascension to the vice presidency. And
even Fox & Friends appears ready to move on, with Brian
Kilmeade urging Trump—a loyal viewer of the program—to let the Biden
transition move forward. “It’s in the country’s best interest if he starts
coordinating on the virus and starts coordinating on security with the Biden
team,” Kilmeade said.
Trump, though, has given no indication that he
plans to do so anytime soon, much to the frustration of Biden officials, who
are eager to do the work Trump is allowing to pile up as he licks his wounds.
“If we have to wait until January 20 to start that planning, it puts us
behind,” the president-elect said this week of
his forthcoming administration’s COVID response. “More people may die if we
don’t coordinate.”
