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.