Thanksgiving Blessing

 

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A Thanksgiving message, from the Pilgrims — and from Bill Buckley

Quin Hillyer, Washington Examiner (11/26/20)

Conservative intellectual giant William F. Buckley once lamented that too many Westerners “accept without any thought the patrimony we all enjoy,” and he wrote a wonderful little book called Gratitude about the need to show thanks by giving back to this country for the blessings it has bestowed on us.

© Provided by Washington Examiner

“A country — a civilization — that gives us such gifts as we dispose of cannot be repaid in kind,” he said in a related speech. Yet, he said 32 years ago Nov. 29, ingratitude for American blessings, including “the freedoms activated by the Bill of Rights,” is a “near universal offense.”

Since 1988, the ingratitude has grown only worse, while recognition of U.S. claims to special virtue has plummeted. This summer, only 60% of those polled said they believe that the United States is even “one of the greatest” nations on Earth, with only 32% calling it the greatest. When someone doesn’t even think he or she is blessed, it’s a lot more difficult for that person to be thankful.

Well, we should be thankful. Buckley was right. And it was fitting that Buckley’s 1988 speech was given at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Each Thanksgiving Day, we celebrate and reenact in spirit, at least nominally, the festivities undertaken in 1621 by the people who landed in North America aboard the Mayflower ship in the previous late autumn. Those men, women, and children, approximately 100 of them, had created and signed 400 years ago last weekend the Mayflower Compact that stands as one of the great advances in all of human self-governance.

Yet in the intervening winter, a full half of those Mayflower passengers, including more than three-fourths of the women, died in the harsh conditions. Even shortly after the “first Thanksgiving” a year after the landing, a visiting traveler named William Hilton found the settlers “sick and weak, with very small means.” Still, having lost half of the Mayflower’s passengers in one year and remaining “weak” in Hilton’s eyes, the survivors found within themselves a sense of gratitude that should inspire us 399 autumns later.

As the only fully contemporaneous account, that of Plymouth settler Edward Winslow, put it, “God be praised … Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors ... Although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty ... I doubt not but by the blessing of God, the gain will give content to all.”

Almost everyone living in this blessed land today has far more for which to be thankful than those Pilgrims and associates did 399 years ago in what to them was a dangerous wilderness. We have standards of living beyond compare in human history. We have more freedom than some of us even know how to use responsibly. We have a constitutional system that, drawing on the principles of self-governance enunciated in the Mayflower Compact, keeps tyranny at bay.

Praise be to God indeed, and to the people of the Mayflower and their descendants in liberty who provided us this heritage — “this patrimony,” as Buckley said, which “we all enjoy.”

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How America Outgrew the Pilgrims

By Joshua Zeitz, Politico (11/25/20)

Four hundred years ago this month, the Mayflower, carrying over 100 passengers plus crew, dropped anchor near Cape Cod after a perilous, two-month voyage. Of those on board, roughly half were Puritan separatists—dissenters who broke away from the Church of England and hoped to establish a new society rooted in what they believed to be authentic Christian worship. Cape Cod was neither their original nor final destination. Bound originally for Virginia, where they had been invited by local authorities to form their community, the “Pilgrims” experienced trouble navigating the rough currents of the Atlantic and instead made their way to nearby Plymouth, where they first set foot on December 11. The rest is history.

© AP Photo/David Goldman The Mayflower II, a replica of the original Mayflower ship that brought the Pilgrims to America, sails into Plymouth, Mass., on Aug. 10, 2020.

Given the central position the Plymouth landing long played in American public memory, it’s telling that the 400th anniversary has gone by largely unnoticed. Not so last year’s 400th anniversary of slavery’s roots in North America. The New York Times’s 1619 Project excited tremendous controversy because it challenged established narratives that date the founding of America’s political development and character to 1620 or 1776. To be sure, some conservative voices, have seized on this year’s anniversary to counter the NYT’s undertaking, but for the most part, they seem to be shouting into a void. Relative to the debate over 1619, there’s been little fanfare, and even less debate.

How is that possible? These are the same Pilgrims who, the year after their arrival, enjoyed the first American Thanksgiving meal with their neighbors from the Wampanoag nation—an event steeped in lore and closely associated with one of the country’s most beloved holidays. The same Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact, which arguably planted the first democratic seeds in New World. The same Pilgrims who transported a strain of Christian millennialism to America that influenced the development of political culture throughout the United States.

In some ways, the quiet passing of this event right-sized the role of the Pilgrims. The colony they established, Plymouth, was a small, struggling outpost that never achieved the prosperity or influence of its close cousin, Massachusetts Bay, settled 10 years later by non-separatist Puritans. It ceased to exist by 1691. Puritanism—both in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay—fell into a state of decline within a generation of each colony’s founding. Ultimately, the political and religious culture the Pilgrims and Puritans built had little to do with the nation we became—it shaped neither the republican revolution against Parliament and Crown in the 18th century nor America’s evolution into a diverse and boisterous democracy in the 19th century. Unlike 1619 and 1776—the latter, a landmark moment in the nation’s political development; the former, the nation’s original sin—the Plymouth landing was always more durable in memory than influence.

America’s romance with Puritan New England always had more to do with how Americans wanted to remember the nation’s founding than with its real importance to the country’s evolution. Four hundred years later, not only would the Pilgrims find the country they inhabited completely alien, they wouldn’t understand why we commemorate their Thanksgiving feast of waterfowl, venison, clams and lobster with a standard meal of turkey, stuffing and sweet potato casserole with marshmallows.

It’s possible we’ve outgrown the need for this particular myth—and that’s one of the things we have to be thankful for.

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in December 1620 occupied the extreme edges of the Puritan movement, an opposition strain within the Church of England. Puritans, both separatists and non-separatists, deplored Anglican forms of worship that departed from original Pauline practices: priests in robes and vestments; a prayer book and liturgy divergent from the Bible; candles, ornaments and holidays—including Christmas—seemingly more pagan in origin than Christian. They also broke with Anglican theology. They were Calvinists who held individuals powerless to determine their destiny in the world beyond, whereas the Church of England had drifted in recent years toward an “Arminian” belief that through good works and faith, Christians could secure their own salvation.

Whereas the Puritans who founded Massachusetts Bay in 1630 considered themselves reformers within the Church of England, the Plymouth settlers of 1620 had already broken with the church. In 1609 they left their home in Scrooby, England, for Leyden in the Netherlands, where Dutch officials permitted them to practice their religion in peace, but where local economic conditions impoverished their community. By the time they set sail for America, the Pilgrims, as they would later come to be known, considered themselves strangers in the world—persecuted dissenters living in opposition to the crown and the church. Their separatism distinguished them from Puritan cousins in Massachusetts Bay, who still hoped for a reformation of the Church of England.

In reality, though, Pilgrims of Plymouth and Puritans of Massachusetts Bay increasingly shared closely identical religious worldviews and social systems. Their churches were congregational—independent, and free of ecclesiastical control. They worshipped in plain, rough-hewn buildings, absent the decorative ornaments and trappings of English church architecture. Their prayer services were long affairs—three hours in some cases—combining biblical readings, sermons and the singing of psalms. In Massachusetts Bay, one had to be a church member to be a “freemen” and participate in local government. In both places, the distinction between civil and religious law was blurry at best. Laws against cursing, fornication, “scandalous carriage” and “insolency” often carried official church censure and community penalties.

From the start, the Puritan project faced steep challenges. A large number of Mayflower passengers were “strangers”—servants or craftsmen who were necessary to the settlement but did not share in the separatists’ religious faith. Their participation in the project augured a day when large numbers of Plymouth and Massachusetts residents would fall outside the tight-knit community of pious Christians.

Local conditions were also trying. Arriving at the start of winter, the original settlers were unable to plant crops or build suitable shelter. Disease wiped out almost half of the Mayflower’s passengers within six months of their debarkation. (The first Thanksgiving, of which scant details survive, celebrated the colony’s successful harvest a year later, due in no small part to help the Wampanoags lent the English in learning to plant in local conditions. Until then, it had not been clear the colony would survive.) Whereas the Massachusetts Puritans who arrived a decade later were better funded and built a thriving agricultural colony, Plymouth remained a small and relatively poorer society of fishermen and small farmers.

Nevertheless, by the 1630s, as the population of Plymouth grew, and as the success of nearby Massachusetts opened up new local markets for lumber, fish and other goods, the first and second generation of settlers fanned out and established new towns—Taunton, Rehoboth, Bridgewater, Middleborough. They spread out onto Cape Cod. These signs of growth and economic progress fostered their own problems. The small, corporal nature of the original religious settlement threatened to dilute itself through physical dispersion. “This I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them,” worried William Bradford, a founder and long-serving governor of the Plymouth colony. Likewise, Bradford and other leaders fretted that some members of the community were no longer “content with their condition” or committed to the Puritan religious project. It was “not for want or necessity so much that they removed as for enriching themselves.” Love of money threatened to overtake love of God.

Perhaps because they were not, strictly speaking, separatists, and did not identify themselves as dissenters, the founding generation in Massachusetts worried far more about enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy and subjected applicants for church membership to strict interviews to establish their fealty to Puritan doctrine. The colony’s leaders also dealt with dissent from the fringes of their own movement—radicals like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, whose predestinarian ardor ran so hot that both were reluctant to worship in the presence of anyone who might be unregenerate, including certain ministers. Bradford regarded Williams, who flitted between both colonies before being banished altogether from Massachusetts, as “godly and zealous … but very unsettled in judgement.” Officials in the non-separatist colony found Hutchison equally dangerous, no doubt because she was an outspoken and charismatic woman in an age when women were politically and socially disenfranchised, but also because her counter movement threatened the stability of the religious establishment. If, as she believed, the elect were already bound for salvation, they didn’t need ministers, churches or formal prayer. That was a step too far, even for a stringent Puritan community. Unsurprisingly, the founders banished for heresy.

These debates, which threatened to fray the fabric of the community, reflected a genuine and abiding concern with which Puritans in these early days grappled. They believed that people were either born with God’s grace, or not. Those born with it were few. Most people were sinful and depraved. Ordinary Puritans worried a great deal about their own condition, knowing they could not change it. Michael Wigglesworth, a tutor at Harvard—the school Massachusetts Puritans built to train ministers—fretted over his “carnal” leanings. “I am often slothful and lay down the weapons of my warfare and do not fight, cry [and] strive as I should against,” he wrote.

If outward signs of sin were likely a sign that one was unregenerate, could an outward show of piety be a sign that one was elect? A person couldn’t buy his or her way to heaven through good deeds or good works. But “invisible saints” probably did lead upstanding lives, as a reflection of their own salvation. How, then, could one distinguish between church members who were truly among the elect, and those who were, even subconsciously, attempting to project the right image in hopes they might be saved? The question seems circular, but it was enormously important to the early settlers. It also proved a seed of their undoing.

By the 1660s large numbers of residents of both colonies were not baptized church members—perhaps because (in Massachusetts) they were denied admission for failing to show “God’s dealings” in themselves, or (in both colonies) they were put off by the insular debates that consumed the established congregations. Since only the children of church members could be baptized, this decline in membership snowballed. Some congregations embraced a “half-way covenant” by which the children of non-church members could be baptized and made part members of the community. But the writing was on the wall. Shortly before his death Bradford observed mournfully that Plymouth had become “an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children.” Whereas upwards of 80 percent of Plymouth and Massachusetts settlers belonged to churches in the 1640s, by the 1670s that portion fell to as low as 30 percent.

Both colonies were, in some measure, also a victim of colonial expansion. As economic conditions stabilized, a large influx of newcomers—Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish—who belonged to other religious movements (Baptists, Presbyterians, even Anglicans) diluted the original homogeneity of the New England colonies. War with their Native American neighbors took a steep toll on Plymouth’s residents in the 1670s as well. In the following decade, the crown combined both colonies, as well as several others, into the short-lived Dominion of New England. When that experiment failed, in 1691 the government in London compelled Plymouth to be absorbed into Massachusetts.

While Calvinism and strains of the Puritan worldview would continue to influence religion and politics in colonial New England for many decades to come, the 18th century saw the population grow and become increasingly heterogenous, as successive generations made the transition from “Puritan to Yankee.” The Revolutionary War, and the political events that preceded it, introduced profound changes—a separation of church and state, an end to monarchy, new systems of government rooted in popular consent—that had little to do with, and in many ways broke with, the system that Pilgrims and Puritans had established in their own time. It represented a victory for republicanism, not Christian purism.

By the 1800s, as American popular democracy flourished, so did a new spirit of public religiosity. But the new, dominant theology—evangelical Christianity, prevalent in the rising Baptist and Methodist movements—was Arminian in character. Better suited to an emerging market economy and democratic culture in which individuals felt empowered to determine their own destiny in this life, evangelical revivalism encouraged people to believe they could also determine their fate in the next life, by accepting Christ and choosing to be saved. When confronted by a Calvinist critic, the famous Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright (who would later lose a bitter congressional race against Abraham Lincoln), replied that Americans “were a free people and lived in a free country, and must be allowed to do as they pleased.”

In a world where “each pursuing their own interests for their own sake,” as one writer put it, was the transcendent ideal, strict Calvinism no longer made sense. People were empowered to choose their own path. As Daniel Webster wrote: “The public happiness is to be the aggregate of the happiness of individuals. Our system begins with the individual man.”

Far from laying the foundation of American political and religious culture, the Puritan settlers, separatists and non-separatists alike, built an inward, particular religious community that frayed within three generations of their arrival in the New World. Their influence persisted, and their ideas may have influenced in a lasting way what historian Perry Miller called “the New England mind.” Well into the early nineteenth century, many Baptist and Presbyterian churches clung to a watered-down form of predestinarian theology. Methodist camp meetings and popular revivals held less interest in New England, where in the year following the Revolution, state governments were slow to disestablish the Congregational Church. But the Puritan legacy had little to do with the noisy democratic and evangelical culture that became so distinctly American in later centuries.

If the Pilgrims and their non-separatist cousins played a minimal role in shaping American religious and political culture, they became the subject of fascination in the late 19th century, as a rising tide of immigrants—newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, Jews and Catholics who spoke in foreign tongues, worshipped in different ways and seemed something less than white—prompted many native-born citizens to stake claim to their roots as original Americans. Popular magazines ran articles and sketches with titles like, “The Puritans First Thanksgiving,” “Does the Puritan Survive” or “From Puritanism—Whither?” On Thanksgiving in 1887, the citizens of Springfield, Massachusetts—certainly more than a stone’s throw from where the Mayflower first docked—unveiled a nine-foot bronze statue, The Puritan, the work of August Saint-Gaudens, while two years later, national political leaders gathered to dedicate the Pilgrim Monument at Plymouth itself.

Few artists, writers or politicians bothered to distinguish between the separatists of Plymouth and non-separatists of Massachusetts, though when the New England Society of Pennsylvania—one of many such organizations that flourished in the 1890s, like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mayflower Association—commissioned Saint-Gaudens to replicate a The Puritan for placement in Philadelphia, the sculptor insisted on modifying his original work slightly and naming it, The Pilgrim. At the dedication of a similar Pilgrim statue in Central Park, commissioned by the New England Society of New York, George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s, implored observers to consider the lasting importance of the nation’s Puritan founders. “We raise the statue of the pilgrim,” he began, “that in this changeless form the long procession of the generations which shall follow may see what manner of man he was to the outward eye, whom history and tradition have so often flouted and traduced.”

That was the essence of it all. At Forefathers’ Day celebrations each year throughout the north and northeast, on Thanksgiving Day (a national holiday that began after the Civil War and had, at best, tenuous roots to the Pilgrim Thanksgiving of 1621), native-born Americans celebrated the “changeless form” of the Pilgrims and Puritans to brace themselves in a fast-changing nation.

As immigrant communities steadily acculturated—their children, born in the United States, spoke accentless English, learned to love baseball and Hollywood, fought in World War II, settled post-war suburbia and staked their own claim to whiteness—the need to distinguish them from the colonial generation dissipated. Today, Thanksgiving is a blend of sentimental and mawkish, combining fragments of the first Pilgrim meal with traditions established in the years immediately following the Civil War.

To be sure, today, and particularly at Thanksgiving time, Americans still remember the Mayflower Compact, the courtship of Miles Standish—some even remember the name Mary Chilton, supposedly the first person to step on Plymouth Rock. But as a country, we’ve become unrecognizable to that first generation of New Englanders, and no longer as invested in mythologizing their world as were Americans 150 years ago. On the contrary, the rigid society the Pilgrims sought to build, based on exclusivity and sameness, and the narrow definition of citizenship that inspired some Americans to excavate their memory more two centuries later, are out of step with the diverse (and often quarrelsome) capitalist democracy we’ve come to be.

In some way, the non-importance ascribed to the 400th anniversary of the Plymouth landing, in contrast to the spirited debate over 1619, reflects the right priorities. We still grapple with the legacy of slavery in ways both profound and worrying, and the impulse to claim the mantle of “true Americans” hasn’t left our politics. But we can be thankful that the Pilgrim’s world of “invisible saints” and unregenerate sinners, of closed communities and neo-theocracy, has little to do with the America we know, nor has it for a very long time.

Veterans Day

 

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Veterans Day: A sobering reminder that freedom isn’t free

the Deseret News Editorial Board (11/11/20)

Americans have a propensity for naivete when it comes to great victories in battle.

© Scott G Winterton, Deseret News A small American flag waves in the wind after being placed on the Veterans Memorial at the Memorial Redwood Mortuary and Cemetery on Sunday, May 24, 2020.

Veterans Day offers a sober dose of realism.

The observance traces its roots back 102 years when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the Allies’ decisive victory in World War I forced Germany to agree to an armistice. This was cast as the war to end all wars. Americans, who had lost about 116,000 soldiers, clung to the hope it was true. In Utah, as celebrations broke out, the Deseret News said on Nov. 11, 1918, “Tyranny and despotism have had their brutal swing … The pursuit has been long and bitter, but it has overtaken them at last, and they disappear now forever.”

The next day, the newspaper continued that optimism, saying that the terms of armistice “put it out of Germany’s power to lift her hand in battle again in this war, or indeed in any other for many years to come.”

But that soon proved tragically wrong. The harsh terms of that surrender would put the seeds of anger, revenge and political scheming into the heart of a young Adolph Hitler, and Germany soon would prove a major cause of a new and even more destructive world war that would cost the lives of more than 400,000 U.S. soldiers.

In a similar vein, when the Soviet Union collapsed after decades of a Cold War and the revolt of millions of oppressed people, some proclaimed that it ushered in a new era of peace. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote “The end of history and the last man,” arguing that the world had achieved “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Fukuyama’s argument often gets misinterpreted. He didn’t claim all conflicts would end, but that liberal democracies and free markets would continue to grow in strength and influence. Many people saw the era, however, as the dawn of lasting peace.

But soon terrorists struck the United States, killing thousands on 9/11 and ushering in years of military conflict in the Middle East. And today China is flexing her muscles, Russia is trying to expand influence in Ukraine and around the world, and North Korea poses a possible nuclear threat to its neighbors.

The need for selfless service, heroism in battle and, yes, the ultimate sacrifice of soldiers giving their lives for freedom and liberty, has no foreseeable end. Etched into the Korean War Memorial in Washington is the phrase, “Freedom is Not Free.” The past century has been a testament to the truth of those words.

No military victory can be so decisive, no super weapon can be so destructive as to end, once and for all, the lust for power in some people, fueled by whatever grievances or deranged ideologies might propel them toward power. Evil constantly reinvents itself, even as it constantly poses a danger to freedom.

That makes Veterans Day an especially poignant time to ponder, reflect and give thanks. Our present favorable condition, the pandemic notwithstanding, is attributable to those who bravely stood up, stepped forward and put on a uniform in the name of us all. Our thanks should be never-ending.

Make Climate Great Again

 

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US election result boosts preparations for UN climate summit

Fiona Harvey Environment correspondent, The Guardian (11/10/20)

Preparations for the next vital UN summit on the climate – one of the last chances to set the world on track to meet the Paris agreement – have been given a boost by the election of Joe Biden as president.

© Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The election caps a remarkable few weeks on international climate action, which have seen China, the EU, Japan and others commit to long-term targets on greenhouse gas emissions to fulfil the Paris climate agreement.

Biden has vowed to return the US to the Paris agreement, from which Donald Trump withdrew, and to set a goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, commitments that were underlined by his references to the climate crisis in his speeches after the result became clear.

“The difference [between the US under Biden and under Trump] will be night and day,” said Todd Stern, climate envoy to Barack Obama. “This is critical. Joe Biden understands [the climate crisis] and that it will be about how we collectively drive a transformation to a net zero economy. The US will engage with China, the other big players, and the smaller players – the countries that care deeply about climate change [because they are most affected by it] – they all have a role to play.”

“With Joe Biden elected, what is indispensable can now become possible,” said Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister who oversaw the 2015 Paris agreement, now president of France’s Constitutional Council. He told the Guardian: “We shall have the conjunction of the planets which made possible the Paris agreement. Civil society, politics, business all came together for the Paris agreement. We are looking at the same conjunction of the planets now with the US, the EU, China, Japan – if the big ones are going in the right direction, there will be a very strong incentive for all countries to go in the right direction.”

© Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters US president-elect Joe Biden has vowed to return the US to the Paris agreement.

That brightens the prospects considerably for the next UN climate summit, Cop26, which would have taken place this week, in Glasgow, had the Covid-19 pandemic not forced a postponement. The talks will take place just under a year from now, and negotiations have continued apace, though hampered by countries’ need to deal with the pandemic crisis.

The re-entry of the US into the Paris fold, and Biden’s proposals for a green economic rescue from Covid, cap a remarkable few weeks of international climate action. Leading nations have made a spate of commitments that have transformed the prospects for Cop26: countries responsible for more than half of global emissions and two thirds of the global economy are now committed to net zero emissions by mid-century – the goal that scientists say is vital to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown.

China surprised the world in late September, when President Xi Jinping told the UN general assembly that his country would reach net zero emissions by 2060 and cause its greenhouse gas production to peak by 2030. While details of how Xi intends to achieve this are scant, the plan by the world’s biggest emitter was hailed as a “game-changer” by climate diplomats.

After China’s announcement, Japan’s new prime minister also committed to net zero by 2050, and South Korea followed suit. The EU also reconfirmed in September its net zero goal for mid-century, under the EU green deal.

With China, the US and the EU now broadly aligned, and dozens of smaller countries also committed to net zero plans, success at Cop26 looks possible. But there are still key stumbling blocks.

The crucial issue will be the difference between the long-term targets for reaching net zero emissions by mid-century, and the shorter term targets needed to get there. With the long-term targets in place, attention will turn to the commitments countries are making to reduce emissions in the next decade.

Under the Paris agreement, nations are committed to holding global temperatures well below 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to limit heating to 1.5C. To do this, when the agreement was signed in 2015, countries set out national plans – called nationally determined contributions – for cutting emissions by 2030, or similar dates.

Those plans were insufficient, and would lead to 3C of warming. The accord stipulates that every five years countries must put forward fresh targets, and the deadline for those NDCs now looms. Some countries will miss the deadline – Biden cannot make commitments until he takes office in January, and China is still finalising its five-year economic plan for next spring, and so may delay – but the UN is hoping that all will be ready in time for scrutiny ahead of the rescheduled Cop26.

The Guardian understands that the UK, which as host of Cop26 needs to set an example, intends to submit its NDC before a key meeting that Boris Johnson will chair, with the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, in a month’s time. The Climate Ambition Summit on 12 December will mark exactly five years since the gavel came down on the Paris agreement, and is intended to galvanise action on the NDCs.

That meeting will be a key test of Johnson’s climate diplomacy. Biden will not be present at the summit, as the Trump administration will still be in office. Trump will be invited, but it is not known whether he intends to attend. It will be Johnson’s first stint as host of a major international summit, and a dry run for both Cop26 and the UK’s G7 presidency next year, which is also expected to focus on the climate and the need for a green recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Johnson’s prospective relationship with Biden, proudly Irish-American, has come under the spotlight in recent days, particularly on Biden’s stated concerns over the safety of the Good Friday agreement under Brexit. However, those differences are unlikely to have a strong impact on the climate summit’s success, according to Tom Burke, co-founder of the green thinktank E3G and a veteran government adviser.

“Biden’s victory will be a boost and I don’t think Boris Johnson’s relationship with him will make much difference to that,” he told the Guardian. “There is no difference between the interests of Johnson and Biden on Cop26 – they both know they have to make progress, irrespective of whether there is a falling out over Northern Ireland. They will still work together on the climate, and only the vaporous will conflate the issues.”

Real Making America Great Again

 

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Are you willing to do what it takes to heal America?

John Grossenbacher, opinion contributor (11/18/20

President-elect Joe Biden and others are understandably talking about the need to "heal our country." Bitter divisiveness following a national election is not new in America, but this time it's different. Half of us simply cannot comprehend how the other half voted for the presidential candidate that they did. Our divisions go far beyond disagreements over policy, principle and self-interest; they feel like tribal warfare. The unsettling behavior of President Trump and his refusal to accept the election's outcome amplifies these feelings.

© Getty Images Are you willing to do what it takes to heal America?

A unifying leader will help, but healing our country is really up to the American people. Combatting the pandemic with competence and compassion, mourning those who have died and caring for those with long-term COVID-19 illness are urgent imperatives, as is rebuilding our economy. But these will not heal what divides us. Addressing climate change, racial injustice, rebalancing capitalism and reforming America's politics are essential, but they won't heal us either.

To heal America, we must breathe life into the better angels of our nature. We have to act upon Abraham Lincoln's admonition that "we must not be enemies." Toxic levels of exclusivity and intolerance that have crept into our communities are part of what ails us. We must engage in collective soul-searching to create the opportunity for change.

Religious, spiritual and philosophical leaders are essential to re-grounding us in the importance of trust, fairness and respect for one another. They can help us refresh our common agreement about what matters most in our lives, our interdependence and mutuality. Health care workers also can lead us in this re-grounding. Their profession uniquely enables them to see people through the lenses of both science and our humanity. They bear witness to the determinants of health and well-being that we and our society have created. Their compassion during the pandemic has drawn our attention, and we need them to expand their influence and leadership.

To heal America, we must have broad agreement on facts, and understand real uncertainties and risks. Our education as citizens, and our constructive engagement with one another, requires this. Meaningful reform of our societal systems is not possible without it. Misuse of information technologies - specifically, the perverse influences of social media - is where we should begin. Google, Twitter, Facebook and other internet giants are not free services; they harvest our attention and information about our preferences and sell both to advertisers. Their size and business models have combined to play to our weaknesses. Virtual communities that thrive on the creation of "alternative facts" are just one of the undesirable consequences. No entity should be allowed to wield so much power and influence in the daily lives of so many people.

To heal America, "We, the People" have to take more personally the serious work of citizenship. A recommitment to tolerance for our differences, and an understanding of the roles and limitations of both government and the private sector, are necessary. A respect for the balanced role of personal and shared responsibilities is needed. If we continue to assert that preferences are rights, and believe we should use the courts to sit in judgment of our neighbor's choices simply because they are not consistent with our values, we will not heal.

If we only superficially understand concepts such as capitalism and socialism, democracy and a republic, we will be manipulated by those who can benefit from our ignorance. They will exploit the divisions we enable them to create. If we do not engage and listen with civility and humility to our fellow citizens with whom we disagree, then we cannot build consensus nor forge compromise. If we don't decide to work harder at being better citizens, we cannot live together.

To heal America, we need to abandon the battlefield of the ongoing culture war and stop following its self-appointed generals. Urban, rural, suburban, immigrant, white, Black, Latinx, college-educated, working class, wealthy, poor, Republican, Democrat - we all must decide if the membership we call "citizenship" means more than being a member of one of these groups. For us to heal, we must believe we are Americans all, Americans first, and act like it.

This healing will not be easy. It will take time that we likely don't have, efforts that we never have made, and methods that many of us have not tried. Nonetheless, it is the essential prerequisite to our really moving forward as a nation.

I believe we can do this if enough Americans commit to unprecedented, transformational change. Unifying leaders cannot do it for us, but they can point the way, call us to action, and facilitate our organizing around hugely important tasks. I hope that Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are such leaders, and that amid all that commands their time and attention, they call us to this difficult effort of healing. I hope, too, that we Americans are up to the task.

John J. Grossenbacher retired in 2003 as U.S. Navy vice admiral and commander of the U.S. Naval Submarine Forces, following a 33-year naval career. He directed the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory for 10 years, overseeing scientific and engineering research in nuclear and other energy resources, the environment and homeland security.

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Angela Merkel's message to Joe Biden

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN (11/10/20)

Angela Merkel's faith in America was deeply shaken when Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016.

© Handout/Jesco Denzel/Bundesregierung/Getty Images German Chancellor Angela Merkel deliberates with US president Donald Trump on the sidelines of the official agenda of the G7 summit on June 9, 2018 in Charlevoix, Canada.

The German Chancellor who grew up behind the Iron Curtain was quicker than most to perceive his threat to the kind of US global leadership that has traditionally underwritten European security. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Merkel may well have opted not to run for a fourth term. But she would not retire with Trump in the White House, seeing him as a peril to the West, its common values and security architecture like NATO.

A sense of relief four years later pulsed through her congratulatory message to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. "Joe Biden brings with him decades of experience in domestic and foreign policy. He knows Germany and Europe well," Merkel said in her first televised address since the US election.

Her greeting envisages America returning as an assertive global leader to tackle the "major challenges of our time" like climate change, the pandemic, terrorism, trade and the economy, "side by side" with Europe. But Merkel also understands that Trump's presidency, attacks on NATO and reasonable demands for Europe to pay more for its own defense reflect political dynamics within the US that mean the old halcyon days of American protection aren't coming back -- even if Russia remains a vigorous adversary.

"We Germans and Europeans understand that we must take on more responsibilities in this partnership in the 21st century. America remains our most important ally, but it rightfully expects more effort from us to guarantee our own security and to defend our values around the world," Merkel said.

The "Chancellor of the Free World" does not plan to run for reelection again. That could leave Biden as one of the last active politicians whose worldviews were shaped by the Cold War. Not enough strategic thinking has been done so far on either side of the Atlantic on how to evolve the world's most effective alliance for the 21st century, especially with the US increasingly looking to China as its most important foreign policy issue.

The end of Trump's "America First" nationalism buys the West a little time to accelerate that thinking. But the urgent questions he posed are not going away.

Evangelicals Gotterdammerung with Trump

 

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Donald Trump's failure to work with Joe Biden is becoming more urgent as Covid spreads

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN (11/15/20)

President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden's aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost.

© MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images US President Donald Trump arrives to deliver an update on "Operation Warp Speed" in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on November 13, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, the President-elect's team and independent public health experts as Covid-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 US lives a day. More than 246,000 Americans have now died from the disease.

But instead of listening or mobilizing to tackle what some medical experts warn is becoming a "humanitarian" crisis, Trump spent the weekend during which the US passed 11 million infections amplifying lies and misinformation about his election loss. At one point, he appeared to acknowledge Sunday in a tweet that Biden won, before backtracking with a stream of defiance on Twitter.

This came as the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that "of course it would be better if we could start working with" the Biden team that will take office on January 20.

"It's almost like passing a baton in a race -- you don't want to stop and then give it to somebody," Fauci, who has been marginalized by the outgoing President, told Jake Tapper. "You want to just essentially keep going. And that is what transition is."

Biden's incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Sunday that the President-elect's team had been unable to talk to current top health officials like Fauci about the pandemic owing to Trump's refusal to trigger ascertainment — the formal process of opening a transition to a new administration.

"Joe Biden's going to become president of the United States in the midst of an ongoing crisis. That has to be a seamless transition," Klain said on NBC's "Meet the Press," adding that while the new administration planned to contact top pharmaceutical firms making the vaccine like Pfizer, it was particularly key to get in touch with Department of Health and Human Services officials responsible for rolling it out in the coming months.

"Our experts need to talk to those people as soon as possible so nothing drops in this change of power we're going to have on January 20th," Klain said.

But the official who is currently most influential with the President, Dr. Scott Atlas, who critics say favors a herd immunity approach that could lead to thousands of deaths, wrote an inflammatory tweet on Sunday that exemplified the White House's contempt for unifying leadership during the pandemic. Atlas called on the people of Michigan to "rise up" against new Covid-19 restrictions introduced in schools, theaters and restaurants by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer -- who was recently the target of an alleged domestic terrorism kidnapping plot.

Whitmer said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday evening that she would not be "bullied into not following reputable scientists and medical professionals."

'We need to be prepared'

Fauci is not the only senior US official calling for transition talks to open. Moncef Slaoui, the official in charge of Trump's vaccine effort, told the Financial Times in an interview that he wanted to reach out to Biden's team, but added that he couldn't do so without White House permission.

As the Biden team increases the pressure for the launch of a proper transition -- which includes office space, meetings in government agencies and millions of dollars in government funding -- members of Biden's Covid-19 advisory board spoke in increasingly alarmed terms about the effect of a continued stalemate.

Board member Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Saturday that the situation was like a terrorist attack or war and there needed to be a smooth handoff. "We need to be prepared, and in the absence of that critical data, there may be blind spots we're not able to anticipate and that leaves us quite vulnerable."

Another board member, infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, bemoaned Trump's abdication of the crisis and said leadership would only arrive in January, as he pushed for the immediate opening of contacts between the transition and the White House.

"It's our hope that in the very near future, we can start to collaborate with them," he said, warning on CNN on Saturday of a rapid rise in cases over the next month.

An independent expert, Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, cited research saying that 2,500 Americans could die from Covid-19 every day by January and described the situation as a "humanitarian catastrophe" that Trump was making worse.

"I can't think of a more important time in modern American history," Hotez told CNN's Ana Cabrera. "We need a smooth transition. The fact that, this is the time it won't occur, will only mean greater loss of life, so this is incredibly heartbreaking," he said.

Biden to deliver economic message

As Biden prepares for power despite the obstruction of the President, he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will speak about the economy in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday. The President-elect has repeatedly stressed that there will be no long-term rescue for the economy without bringing the virus under control, and he has used his public appearances since the election to plead with Americans to adopt measures like mask wearing that can save lives until Covid-19 vaccines become widely available next year.

The pandemic is not the only area where Biden is being deprived of transition privileges usually offered to a President-elect within hours of victory. He still has not been read into America's most closely held secrets in intelligence briefings, for instance. Transition teams are supposed to be able to enter government departments to provide for a trouble-free handover of power at noon on January 20.

While much of the rest of the world has moved on and accepted Biden's triumph, and even some Republican senators say that Biden should get intelligence briefings at a minimum, Trump is still fixated on the election.

For the first time Sunday, he appeared in a tweet to at least acknowledge that Biden won, blaming his loss on a string of conspiracy theories. He followed up with another tweet refusing to concede and ignoring his failing legal challenges and the reality of Biden's win with several states to spare.

Trump played golf twice over the weekend and on Saturday drove past a crowd of supporters protesting the election results in Washington, DC, in between his Twitter rampages.

In an interview with CBS "60 Minutes" coinciding with the release of his memoir, "A Promised Land," former President Barack Obama compared the behavior of the President to that of a child.

"If my daughters -- in any kind of competition -- pouted and then accused the other side of cheating when they lost, when there was no evidence of it, we'd scold them. I think that there has been this sense over the last several years that literally anything goes and is justified in order to get power."

Biden is trying to get the man he defeated to take action now to try to mitigate the desperate situation he is likely to inherit in January. In a statement on Friday, he called on Trump to concentrate on the emergency at hand and to take urgent action.

"This crisis demands a robust and immediate federal response, which has been woefully lacking. I am the president-elect, but I will not be president until next year," Biden said, underscoring the limitations of his position. "The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar, it is accelerating right now."

But Trump, who held a press conference on Friday claiming credit for vaccine developments while ignoring the lightning spread of Covid on his watch, appears only to have an interest in one thing: his own diminishing political prospects.

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Biden moves forward without help from Trump's intel team

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press (11/11/20)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The presidential race was hovering in limbo in 2000 when outgoing President Bill Clinton decided to let then-Gov. George W. Bush read the ultra-secret daily brief of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.

© Provided by Associated Press President-elect Joe Biden stands with his hand over his heart, after placing a wreath at the Philadelphia Korean War Memorial at Penn's Landing, on Veterans Day, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2020, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Clinton was a Democrat and his vice president, Al Gore, was running against Republican Bush. Gore had been reading the so-called President's Daily Brief for eight years; Clinton decided to bring Bush into the fold in case he won and he did.

President Donald Trump has not followed Clinton's lead. As he contests this year's election results, Trump has not authorized President-elect Joe Biden to lay eyes on the brief.

National security and intelligence experts hope Trump changes his mind, citing the need for an incoming president to be fully prepared to confront any national security issues on Day One.

“Our adversaries aren’t waiting for the transition to take place,” says former Michigan Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who was chairman of the House intelligence committee. “Joe Biden should receive the President’s Daily Brief starting today. He needs to know what the latest threats are and begin to plan accordingly. This isn’t about politics; this is about national security.”

© Provided by Associated Press President-elect Joe Biden stands with his hand over his heart before placing a wreath at the Philadelphia Korean War Memorial at Penn's Landing, on Veterans Day, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2020, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

U.S. adversaries can take advantage of the country during an American presidential transition and key foreign issues will be bearing down on Biden the moment he steps into the Oval Office.

Among them: Unless Trump extends or negotiates a new nuclear arms accord with Russia before Inauguration Day, Biden will have only 16 days to act before the expiration of the last remaining treaty reining in the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. Perhaps U.S. spies have picked up tidbits about the Russians' redlines in the negotiations, or about weapons it really wants to keep out of the treaty.

That's the type of information that might be in the PDB, a daily summary of high-level, classified information and analysis on national security issues that's been offered to presidents since 1946. It is coordinated and delivered by the Office of the National Intelligence Director with input from the CIA and other agencies. It is tailored for each president, depending on whether they prefer oral or written briefs or both, short summaries or long reports on paper or electronically.

Having access to the PDB also could help Biden craft a possible response to North Korea, which has a history of firing off missiles or conducting nuclear tests shortly before or after new presidents take office.

Biden has decades of experience in foreign affairs and national security, but he likely has not been privy to the latest details about how Iran is back to enriching uranium, or the active cyber attack operations of Russia, China and Iran. China’s crackdown on Hong Kong is heating up. And the threat from Islamic extremists, although curbed, still remains.

© Provided by Associated Press El demócrata y ganador de las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, habla en el teatro The Queen, el martes 10 de noviembre de 2020, en Wilmington, Delaware. (AP Foto/Carolyn Kaster)

Biden is trying to play down the significance of the delay in getting access to the PDB.

“Obviously the PDB would be useful but, it’s not necessary. I’m not the sitting president now,” Biden said Tuesday. He didn’t answer a question about whether he’d tried to reach out to Trump himself on this or any other issue, saying only, “Mr. President, I look forward to speaking with you.”

He was also asked about needing access to classified information as soon as possible if Trump doesn’t concede the race.

“Look, access to classified information is useful. But I’m not in a position to make any decisions on those issues anyway,” Biden said. “As I said, one president at a time. He will be president until Jan. 20. It would be nice to have it, but it’s not critical.”

Biden is familiar with the PDB, having read it during his eight years as vice president. But threats are ever-changing and as Inauguration Day nears, his need for Trump to let him get eyes on the intelligence brief will become more critical.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., predicted that the issue of whether Biden will get access to the intelligence brief will be resolved soon.

"I've already started engaging in this area. ... And if that's not occurring by Friday, I will step in and push and say this needs to occur so that regardless of the outcome of the election, whichever way that it goes, people can be ready for that actual task,” Lankford told KRMG in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Wednesday.

He said Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also should be getting the briefings, which should not be a problem because she already has security clearances as a member of the Senate intelligence committee.

While the Bush team had access to the intelligence brief in 2000, an election recount delayed the Bush team's access to government agencies and resources for more than five weeks. Biden is missing out on all counts: More than a week into his transition, Biden doesn't have access to the PDB, the agencies or government resources to help him get ready to take charge.

“President-elect Joe Biden and his transition team should not suffer a similar delay,” John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff under Clinton, and Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card wrote in a joint op-ed published this week in The Washington Post.

“We have since learned the serious costs of a delayed transition,” they wrote. “Less than eight months after Bush’s inauguration, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 Americans.”

The 9/11 Commission Report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks warns of the danger in slow-walking presidential transition work in general, not just the intelligence piece. The Bush administration didn't have its deputy Cabinet officers in place until the spring of 2001 and critical subcabinet positions were not confirmed until that summer — if then, the report said.

For now, the office of National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe says it can’t begin talking with the Biden transition team until a federal agency starts the process of transition, which the Trump administration is delaying.

The office, which oversees more than a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies, said it must follow the Presidential Transition Act, which requires the General Services Administration to first ascertain the winner of the election, which Trump is contesting. GSA administrator Emily Murphy, who was appointed by Trump, has not yet officially designated Biden as the president-elect.

Intelligence agencies have given generalized intelligence briefings — minus information on covert operations and sources and methods — for presidential nominees since 1952. President Harry S. Truman authorized them for both parties’ candidates because he was upset about not learning about the U.S. effort to develop an atomic bomb until 12 days into his presidency.

“It’s an important and meaningful tradition, and I’m concerned that it’s not being continued,” said Denis McDonough, a former White House chief of staff during the Obama administration who oversaw the 2017 transition.

Biden started receiving these more general security briefings after he became the Democratic presidential nominee, but it's unclear if he is still getting those. A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment.

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Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani in Washington and Will Weissert in Wilmington, Delaware, contributed to this report.

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Fighting Election Results, Trump Employs a New Weapon: The Government

Peter Baker and Lara Jakes, NY Times (11/10/20)

WASHINGTON — President Trump, facing the prospect of leaving the White House in defeat in just 70 days, is harnessing the power of the federal government to resist the results of an election that he lost, something that no sitting president has done in American history.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times President Trump has tried to condition a large segment of the American public not to believe anyone other than him, with evident success.

In the latest sign of defiance, the president’s senior cabinet secretary fueled concerns on Tuesday that Mr. Trump would resist handing over power to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after legal challenges to the vote. “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has at the same time authorized investigations into supposed vote fraud, his general services administrator has refused to give Mr. Biden’s team access to transition offices and resources guaranteed under law and the White House is preparing a budget for next year as if Mr. Trump will be around to present it.

The president has also embarked on a shake-up of his administration, firing Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper as well as the heads of three other agencies while installing loyalists in key positions at the National Security Agency and the Pentagon. Allies expect more to come, including the possible dismissals of the directors of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

But the rest of the world increasingly moved to accept Mr. Biden’s victory and prepared to work with him despite Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the results. Speaking with journalists, Mr. Biden called the president’s actions since Election Day “an embarrassment” that will not serve him well in the long run. “How can I say this tactfully?” Mr. Biden said. “It will not help the president’s legacy.”

The standoff left the United States in the position of the kind of country whose weak democratic processes it often criticizes. Rather than congratulating Mr. Biden and inviting him to the White House, as his predecessors traditionally have done after an election changed party control, Mr. Trump has been marshaling his administration and pressuring his Republican allies into acting as if the outcome were still uncertain, either out of faint hope of actually overturning the results or at least creating a narrative to explain his loss.

© Amr Alfiky/The New York Times President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has begun his transition without Mr. Trump’s concession.

The president’s efforts to discredit with false claims both the election results and the incoming Biden administration is in many ways the culmination of four years of stocking the government with pliant appointees while undermining the credibility of other institutions in American life, including intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities, the news media, technology companies, the federal government more broadly and now election officials in states across four time zones.

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump has tried to condition much of the American public not to believe anyone other than him, with evident success. Although the evidence shows there was no widespread conspiracy to steal the election in multiple states that Mr. Trump has invented, at least one poll showed that many supporters accept his claims. Seventy percent of Republicans surveyed by Politico and Morning Consult said they did not believe the election was free and fair.

“What we have seen in the last week from the president more closely resembles the tactics of the kind of authoritarian leaders we follow,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that tracks democracy around the world. “I never would have imagined seeing something like this in America.”

Mr. Abramowitz doubted there was much danger of Mr. Trump overturning the election. “But by convincing a large part of the population that there was widespread fraud, he is seeding a myth that could endure for years and contribute to an erosion of public confidence in our electoral system,” he said.

Mr. Biden has proceeded without waiting for Mr. Trump’s concession and spoke on Tuesday with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Ireland. Most major world leaders have congratulated him on his victory, including close Trump allies like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, another Trump favorite, joined the chorus on Tuesday. The major holdouts remained Presidents Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China.

Mr. Biden said he was not overly concerned with the Trump administration’s refusal to provide transition money, offices and access to agencies, insisting he could assemble a government by his Jan. 20 inauguration. “We are going to be moving along in a consistent manner, putting together our administration, White House,” he said. “Nothing is going to stop us.”

Mr. Biden agreed that it would be helpful to have access to classified information like the presidential daily briefing, something an outgoing administration usually provides an incoming president. But he added, “The fact that they are not willing to acknowledge that we won at this point is not of much consequence to our planning.”

In a testy exchange with journalists at the State Department, Mr. Pompeo insisted that American efforts to prevent voter intimidation and ensure free and fair elections around the world were not diminished by Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede.

“We must count every legal vote,” Mr. Pompeo said, adopting the president’s language. “We must make sure that any vote that wasn’t lawful ought not be counted. That dilutes your vote if it’s done improperly.”

He snapped when asked if Mr. Trump’s delaying tactics undermined the State Department’s efforts to pressure political leaders abroad to accept losing results. “That’s ridiculous and you know it’s ridiculous, and you asked it because it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Mr. Pompeo can often be sarcastic, particularly when speaking to reporters, but the State Department made no effort to clarify if he was joking. Asked later on Fox News if he was serious, he did not say. “We will have a smooth transition,” he said. “And we will see what the people ultimately decided, when all the votes have been cast.”

His comments provoked a backlash from career diplomats, including criticism of his glib tone and outright concerns that the Trump administration would try to steal the election. But Mr. Trump congratulated him later on Twitter: “That’s why Mike was number one in his class at West Point!”

The delay in acknowledging the results has left American embassies in limbo. At least some embassy officials have been told to steer clear of any efforts to help Mr. Biden with foreign leaders who want to congratulate him, as they normally would during a transition. Diplomats said they could not even begin enumerating the successes of the Trump administration for fear of describing it in the past tense.

Some ambassadors sought to straddle the line of neutrality even as they pointedly did not recognize Mr. Biden as the victor. “It’s been a hard fought race that has shown us the American spirit of both grit and resilience,” Robert “Woody” Johnson, the ambassador to Britain, said on Twitter. “Nothing in the history of America worth achieving has ever come easy.”

Other envoys echoed the president’s allegations of voter fraud. “Please don’t disenfranchise me and my fellow voters in order to win at all costs,” Carla Sands, the ambassador to Denmark, said on her personal Twitter page. By way of evidence, she posted a screenshot of a State Department website that could not track her absentee ballot.

“Secretary Pompeo shouldn’t play along with baseless and dangerous attacks on the legitimacy of last week’s election,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The State Department should now begin preparing for President-elect Biden’s transition.”

In extending his purge of the Pentagon on Tuesday, Mr. Trump replaced three more policy officials with loyalists. Some Defense Department officials worried that the replacements could be more amenable to striking American adversaries than their predecessors were.

James Anderson, the acting under secretary of defense for policy who was at odds with the White House, stepped down and was effectively replaced by Anthony Tata, who became “the senior official performing the duties of the under secretary of defense for policy,” as the announcement put it.

Mr. Tata, a retired Army one-star general who has called Islam “the most oppressive violent religion” and referred to former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader,” withdrew from consideration for the top Pentagon policy job in August amid opposition from both Republican and Democratic senators. The president also installed Kashyap Patel, a former aide to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, who played a key role in helping Republicans try to undermine the Russia investigation, as chief of staff to the new acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, adding alarm at the Pentagon over moves to stock the department leadership with loyalists.

Mr. Trump’s allies said the president was justified in fighting the election results even if he was not successful, citing what they deem illegitimate court decisions expanding mail-in voting.

“In light of the Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court’s unconstitutional de facto legislation enacted through its rulings, along with the coming 2022 U.S. Senate and governor races, the Trump campaign’s litigation is essential for Republicans to have a fair playing field in the long term no matter the short term result,” Sam Nunberg, an adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, said by email.

Only nine sitting presidents before Mr. Trump lost bids for another term in a general election (a few others were not renominated by their party), and some like John Adams and John Quincy Adams were sour enough to skip their successors’ inaugurations. But none resisted leaving office or made claims of widespread conspiracy to reverse the outcome.

“We have not seen any president in history lose re-election, refuse to concede defeat and take actions that threaten the abuse of presidential power to keep himself in office,” said Michael Beschloss, a prominent presidential historian. “Here, Donald Trump is yet again in a historical category of his own — and this time, it is ominous for democracy.”

Richard Norton Smith, who wrote a biography of Herbert Hoover and is writing one on Gerald R. Ford, two of the nine, recalled Hoover’s anger at the man who beat him, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their frosty car ride to the inauguration in March 1933.

“But the point is Hoover, however embittered he was over F.D.R.’s unwillingness to cooperate, as he defined the term, shared the same car, just as he had welcomed the Roosevelts for the ritualistic pre-inaugural tea the night before,” Mr. Smith said. “They might despise one another, but their personal animosity was outweighed by their commitment to the democratic process.”

The parallel often cited is when Vice President Al Gore pushed for recounts in Florida in 2000 to overcome a slim lead by his Republican opponent, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas. But Mr. Gore was not the incumbent, and President Bill Clinton did not direct the administration to intervene, although it did withhold transition resources from Mr. Bush until the fight was resolved.

“We were so darn careful not to use any government resources, funds, staff or even a paper clip,” said Donna Brazile, who was Mr. Gore’s campaign manager.

In Florida, Mr. Gore had a plausible chance to change the outcome of the election, given that he was down by only 327 votes in a single state after the automatic machine recount. Mr. Trump, by contrast, is behind by tens of thousands of votes in multiple states that would have to switch, which has never happened on that scale.

“The big difference,” Ms. Brazile said, “is this feels like a major P.R. campaign being waged in the courts to sully the voters where Trump lost or underperformed versus shaping a much larger narrative that this election was so-called rigged.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael D. Shear from Wilmington, Del., and Helene Cooper and Alan Rappeport from Washington.

Reporting was contributed by Michael D. Shear from Wilmington, Del., and Helene Cooper and Alan Rappeport from Washington.