President-elect Joe Biden will become the next president of the United States in January whether Donald Trump concedes or not. Trump has no control over that, short of calling out the Army to stop it—and there is nothing to hint the military would go along.
What Trump can do in the two months from now to then is, primarily, throw a tantrum. This happens to be among his only skills, he is very good at it, and he has been obsessive in clearing from government ranks anyone not willing to treat his screaming tweet-fits as new, loud executive orders.
Trump refuses to believe he lost the election, or rather is pretending to for the sake of narcissism and possible tax consequences: This means his political hires throughout government and whatever career officials do not particularly feel like getting new jobs right now are stonewalling on cooperation with the Biden-Harris transition team, under threat of immediate termination.
It is currently mid-November, and it is not yet a dire problem. Even if Trump tantrums and sabotages until the last day, the Biden team is filled with ex-government officials and experts who already know which buildings are which and where the bathrooms are—they will get back up to speed quickly enough.
If things drag on like this, however, the implications get dicier and dicier. Politico points out that the required background checks and security clearances for Biden hires aren't yet getting underway. They quote historian Michael Beschloss, who says that "never remotely in the founders' wildest dreams" did they imagine a future president might refuse to leave office, but that sounds like a stretch. The founders knew a great many terrible people, and some of them were fairly terrible people themselves.
Thomas Jefferson assuredly contemplated many times what might happen if a future president declared himself above elections. He had a solution, too—though not one we can reprint here without getting the Secret Service pissy at us.
Getting back on track: The longer this goes on, the more fragile the transition in January is going to be, even aside from Trump's own uncontrollable emotions that might be part of a more general Republican and administration plan to sabotage Biden's team in whatever petty ways they can manage even before Biden's team gets in the door. Word comes today that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received an administration email ordering them to have no contact with Biden's transition team, keeping the new administration in the dark as to what new immigration horrors the old administration might hurriedly be inflicting while white nationalists retain control of the agency.
And that's only one agency. In publicly pretending to be confused about the presidential election's winner despite the outcome not being particularly close, the current administration's insistence on not recognizing Biden as president-elect is forcing each government agency to abide by a similar edict. It's very obviously performative, and fairly obviously crooked.
As Biden himself pointed out, the nation is currently not only in a pandemic but in a new out-of-control pandemic surge far in excess of previous records, and at some point soon the Trump administration's stonewalling is going to come with a steep new death count.
While Trump might be doing this because he literally cannot help himself—he is the very personification of malignant narcissism, and we will no doubt be told in multiple books in the coming decade that he was truly incapacitated by the condition, unable to function as president or indeed manage anything but himself in his "administration” while a staff of enabling power-cravers hid the depths of that dysfunction for their own gain—one cannot help but note that Republican lawmakers are very much not taking any steps to rein the administration in here.
Republican Sen. James Lankford was one of several conservative lawmakers who assured the public that he would step in if the administration continued to block Biden from receiving national security briefings as Biden prepared to take office. As his self-declared deadline came and went, though, Lankford insisted to reporters that he did not actually mean what he said, and they had just misconstrued it.
So there may be two separate things going on here. First, Donald Trump personally cannot yet come to terms with his obvious election loss, and is using the official powers of his presidency to pout mightily while denying his opponent any of the trappings of victory it is within his power to deny.
And second, the Republican Party and Trump's arch-conservative administration hires are very much on board with this plan as means of sabotaging an incoming United States presidential team.
It would be asinine to pipe up with oh they would never. Doing real damage to both government and to Americans themselves for the sake of hurting nonconservative opponents has been a staple of new cult Republicanism throughout recent administrations. Republicans deliberately undermined economic recovery after the last recession because they did not want newly installed President Barack Obama to get credit. Republican lawmakers wrote open letters to Iranian leaders warning them that whatever diplomatic breakthroughs Obama attempted would be speedily reversed when Republicans regained power. Republicans invented new theories barring Democrats from appointing Supreme Court justices during their terms. The Trump administration is reported to have intentionally moved sluggishly on the pandemic under the theory that, in the beginning months, it was mostly affecting only Democratic-led states and cities.
Republican lawmakers are not just willing but eager to sabotage national interests in service to party power. Republicans do not recognize the right of nonparty members to govern regardless of election results, and do not recognize the right of nonparty voters to determine the winners of election when they happen. So yes—the current Republican administration attempting whatever petty sabotage can be mustered to allow corporate looting and white nationalist anti-immigration policies to last even a few weeks longer than they otherwise would is very much in line with Senate and House Republican interests. It will likely be a barely audible hiccup compared to the sabotage they will attempt after Biden's inauguration.
In the meantime, this will continue until Trump gets bored. He will get bored, mind you. He will get sullen, and he will feel that the nation betrayed him, and he will fly off to Mar-a-Lago and never come back. He will invent some justification for transferring power that supposes he didn't actually lose and Biden didn't actually win, but nevertheless he just will happen to remember that he has important redecorating work to do in a dining room somewhere, and does not have time for the presidency. His time on stage will be ending, and Republicans will no longer have him to hide their own extremism behind. What happens next will be on them, not him.
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