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(CNN) – US President Donald Trump continues to howl on Twitter between rounds of golf, spreading the lie that he won a losing election and promising he’ll be in the White House in January.
Meanwhile, a “bunker mentality” has been established, according to CNN reports, and the first family canceled Thanksgiving plans in Florida to stay in a White House they will leave in just over two months.
But throughout the administration under Trump – with actions in the Pentagon, inertia in the economy, and denial of the pandemic – the president and his allies are undermining President-elect Joe Biden and harming the American people, even if none of them recognize they are going to be. replaced.
Instead, Trump has been busy firing officials who don’t admit the election fraud narrative: On Tuesday, it was Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security official, who confirmed that the election was safe from meddling.
Here is a brief guide on how Trump leaves things to his successor.
Cloister Biden on foreign policy issues
A report by CNN’s national security team is emblematic of how the Trump administration is actively working to make Biden’s life more difficult.
The goal is to start so many fires that the Biden administration will find it difficult to put out all of them, an administration official told CNN in the report.
The Trump administration is:
- Withdraw more troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in the final days of Trump’s term as president.
- Contemplating new designations of terrorists in Yemen that could complicate efforts to negotiate peace.
- Accelerate the authorization of a massive arms sale that could upset the balance of power in the Middle East.
- Planning a last minute offensive against China.
- Suggesting the idea of a last-minute military attack on Iran, according to the New York Times.
- Building a wall of sanctions that makes it difficult for Biden to re-enter the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump has sunk.
- And the dispatch of Mike Pompeo during the first official visit by a US secretary of state to an Israeli settlement.
- Intentionally making things harder for Biden could set Trump’s argument for a rematch in 2024, according to the report’s experts.
- And Trump’s last-minute shift in civilian leadership at the Pentagon is part of that effort.
- An inexpensive grenade
Trump’s failure to negotiate new stimuli for the covid crisis with Congress will put Biden in a political battle from day one over how to help pandemic-affected Americans.
Here’s what expires in December with no further action:
- Provisions to strengthen unemployment insurance.
- A deferral of student loan payments.
- Provision of paid family leave.
- Coronavirus helps finance states whose tax base has been decimated.
- And a moratorium on evictions.
Trump could potentially address these issues with decrees if he focused on them. Regardless, the Biden presidency’s first major political battle will likely be this showdown with a Republican- or Democrat-controlled Senate.
Trump also signed a temporary delay on payroll taxes this year. Not all employers participated, but as Trump can’t make the tax delay permanent or forgive it, Biden will need to figure out how to make the accumulated payroll taxes not look like a tax hike when the bill is due in 2021. .
Undermining of democracy
The most important of these nails left under the couch cushions is Trump’s firm refusal to accept the legitimacy of Biden’s victory – some ultimately useless resentment as Biden will be sworn in and Trump will no longer be. president in January.
Whether it’s because he wants to close the campaign debt, sow a new media empire of democratic disbelievers, or because he is personally unable to admit defeat, Trump’s actions will have consequences.
We continue to verify these allegations and theories. They all end up being lies.
It is clear that many of Trump’s supporters are fully committed to their disbelief over the election results. If the republican orthodoxy is that Biden is not a real president, he will legitimize and even demand that he hinder his efforts to rule over the next four years and undermine the democratic process.
If Biden wants to rule as a unifier, as he promised, he will first have to find a way to reach the people who are being prepared to believe the counterfactual that stole the election.
Republicans will argue that embittered Democrats likewise set Trump for failure, but this is a false equivalence, as Democrats from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton onward have acknowledged Trump’s victory in real time. It also ignores the evidence that led to the investigation into Russia, Trump’s impeachment and more.
Because the “bunker mentality” is so insidious
Interestingly, that term above – bunker mentality – is applied to oneself anonymously by White House advisers. I have always associated it with the end of Adolf Hitler, in the bunker, surrounded by flatterers, rejecting the facts in the face of certain defeat.
But historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes more broadly in the LA Times, noting that the fact that Trump pushes the huge lie that he won the election and that his party allows him will have corrosive effects on democracy.
I’ll put the last two paragraphs here, but you should read them all and apply them to what we’re seeing in the White House.
Now we see the Republican Party willingly participate in Trump’s hallucinations about his election “victory”. Prominent politicians like Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo follow them with enthusiasm. Even his lies will last and sow bitterness for years.
They have shown that winning, even flattering Trump’s fragile ego, means more to them than the survival of our democracy. How long we can go on as a democracy with one of our two big parties in the hands of these people will be the pressing question in the coming years.
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