Trump and
His Team Are ‘Laughing’ at Biden’s Commitment to Decorum
Biden called Trump a fascist. Now his White House is
ensuring an orderly transfer of power — and staging photo ops with the
president-elect
By
Asawin Suebsaeng, Nikki McCann Ramirez
December
1, 2024
Donald Trump and his incoming administration
officials think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suckers. They’re not shy
about saying it.
Within the past month, Biden, Harris,
and the current administration have repeatedly vowed an orderly, peaceful,
fully cooperative transfer of power between Biden and Trump — a twice-impeached
former president and convicted felon whom the president, vice president,
and Democratic leaders regularly denounced as a “fascist” tyrant and clear
threat to the constitutional order.
It hasn’t just been the legal transfer
and procedures to which Democrats have committed themselves. Biden has promised
to attend Trump’s 2025 inauguration, even though Trump refused to grant him the
same grace after the 2020 election. Of course, then-President Trump actively
sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory and even helped foment a
violent coup at the U.S. Capitol as part of his months-long effort to cling to
power.
Not long after the election this early
November, Biden hosted Trump at the White House for a pleasant photo opportunity. The
president and vice president congratulated Trump, and Biden told him “welcome
back” to his face, as the two men sat down for the news cameras, as if they
were old pals who had just resolved a mildly heated argument.
These actions are all far, far above
and beyond what Trump and his first administration were willing to do during
the last U.S. presidential transition for Biden — including in its commitment
to basic decorum and photo ops that don’t even technically affect the legal
transfer of power.
And — in the same way that top Trump
adviser Stephen Miller privately found it funny that Biden
actually preserved some of his and Trump’s preferred immigration crackdown
methods — members of Team Trump find this asymmetrical level of commitment to
norms, well, funny.
“Some of us have been laughing about
it,” an incoming Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “[Democrats] spend all this time
calling Donald Trump a Nazi and Hitler, and now it’s just: ‘Smile for the
camera!’”
These sentiments of gleefully
rejoicing and sneering at, as one close Trump ally puts it, the Democrats’
almost performative “capitulation” to Trump — who campaigned on a grossly
authoritarian platform that includes wielding the federal apparatus to exact
revenge operations on prominent political enemies — are widely shared in
Trumpland, according to four sources close to the president-elect or working on
the Trump transition.
In recent weeks, according to a source
familiar with the matter, Trump himself has privately mocked Biden for being so
“nice” after Harris lost the election, with the president-elect sarcastically joking that he would have done the
same thing for his Democratic opponents.
Throughout his campaign, Trump
regularly winked and nodded at the possibility that — should he not win a
decisive victory in the general election — he would fall back on his 2020
playbook and reject the will of the voters this year, too.
Fomenting an attempted coup against
the certification of the Electoral College was already a clear enough signal of
Trump’s intentions, but in the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, Trump was also
openly uncooperative with transition officials and the incoming Biden
administration.
The now president-elect waited
until almost two months after
the election to officially concede that he would not be returning to the White
House. He fled D.C. — which was left in a state of outright militarization
following the attack on the Capitol — and refused to attend any events related
to the transition of power, including the inauguration.
Trump’s campaign waited seven weeks
before beginning the most rudimentary discussions about a transition. Biden was
denied the standard books typically authorized for incoming presidents,
including access to daily national security briefings, funds to run the
transition, and office space to begin staging the new administration. Even as
it became crystal clear that Trump had no legitimate claim to a second term,
the White House continued to vet potential
nominees and appointees as if they would remain in power.
By contrast, the Biden administration
has seemingly bent over backward to avoid giving the incoming Trump
administration any opening to claim they are obstructing his return to power.
Earlier this month the two met at the White House to discuss the logistics of
the transfer. Special Counsel Jack Smith — who headed the now defunct federal
prosecutions against Trump — has even begun shuttering his own criminal cases
into Trump, saving Trump some time from following through on his campaign
promise to fire Smith upon retaking the White House.
If there’s anything that will slow
Trump’s transition, it’s his own camp’s refusal to sign the standard financial and
ethics agreements required for agencies involved in the transition to begin
authorizing the release of resources for the incoming administration. His team
finally relented to
some extent last week.
Earlier this year, Trump said it was “ridiculous” that he had to leave
the White House. In November, days before the election, Trump said outright,
“I shouldn’t have left.”
The difference here is that — pleasant
or not — the outgoing administration has a democratic and legal and civic
responsibility to not be like Trump and his loyalists. The peaceful transfer of
power tradition is a central pillar of the democratic process, and messing with
it poses a destabilizing blow to the American experiment.
On the other hand, nobody is legally
or morally obligated to attend January’s celebratory inauguration in
Washington, D.C., or cheese for a photo op, or act publicly chummy with someone
who their political party had (correctly) diagnosed as a bloodthirsty, wannabe
authoritarian — and a threat to basic rights, vulnerable communities, and the
democratic order and health of the nation.
Should Biden refuse to grant Trump his
physical participation in the performance of the inauguration pageantry, the
outgoing president would be far more justified in his reasoning than his
predecessor.