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(CNN) – President Donald Trump’s administration is embracing the characteristics of a faltering regime, with its loyalty tests, destabilizing attacks on the military chain of command, a deepening bunker mentality, and increasingly delusional demands for political victory.
In response, a visibly confident president-elect, Joe Biden, is struggling to project calm amid the growing chaos, even as Trump and senior Republicans still refuse to acknowledge the president’s defeat in a surprising break with the democratic traditions of states. United.
Biden is receiving calls from the leaders of the country’s key allies, testifying to the inevitability of his rise to power. As the president remains behind closed doors, tweets in capital letters, and unleashes a purge of the Pentagon civil leadership, Biden is in front of the camera. The president-elect is reassuring the American people with the composure bestowed by an election victory in which Trump’s bleak legal cases of mass election fraud have little chance of overriding the will of the voters.
Biden avoids confrontation with Trump
On Tuesday, the president-elect knowingly avoided escalating a confrontation with Trump, who is denying the access and funding incoming presidents depend on to defend their administrations. But although Trump will remain president until January 20, an unmistakable symbolic transfer of authority is underway despite Trump’s efforts to deny his successor legitimacy.
“Frankly, we don’t see anything slowing us down,” Biden said.
The president-elect has already passed the necessary threshold of 270 electoral votes, according to projections by CNN and other major media outlets, and has a chance to match Trump’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 given his advantages in Georgia and Arizona.
And other false allegations and conspiracy theories touted by Trump supporters to claim voter fraud is dissolving, a day after Attorney General William Barr entered the political fray to advise prosecutors to investigate a major fraud.
Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Department has rejected rumors that the ballots were cast in the name of deceased people.
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But Trump’s team has only sunk into a strange parallel universe, in which the president has already secured a second term, consistent with the acceptance of the disinformation and alternative facts that have characterized the past four years.
Pompeo uses the platform to promote allegations of election fraud
The administration’s challenge took an even more ridiculous turn on Tuesday when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo showed his loyalty to a leader who shows no signs of working on key issues, including a pandemic that has now brought more Americans to hospitals. never.
“There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Pompeo said. Asked whether Trump’s refusal to give in has undermined traditional US criticism of corrupt elections abroad, Pompeo replied to a reporter: “This is ridiculous. And you know it’s ridiculous, and you asked why it’s ridiculous. “
As late as Monday, Pompeo issued a warning statement about electoral problems in Myanmar, which has long been ruled by the military and has undergone a difficult transition to semi-democracy where dissidents once viewed the United States as a star. polar.
Avoid adding fuel to the fire
In Wilmington, Delaware, the president-elect deliberately refused to add fuel to the fire, dismissing the idea of having to take legal action to unlock the transition funds and making it clear that he was confident that the process of taking power would eventually work. alone.
He described Trump’s behavior since election day as “a shame” and, after saying he was seeking tact, added: “It won’t help the president’s legacy.” When asked if the Republicans would ever accept his victory, he said, “They will, they will” and suggested with a half smile that the Republican senators were “slightly intimidated” by the president.
Biden, who once had a reputation for being a casual public speaker, is showing a new personality to the American people. On Tuesday, she chose her words carefully, showing calm as she undergoes the transformation that often comes with victorious candidates as they begin to take on the burden of presidency after winning elections.
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Purge at the Pentagon
Trump, by contrast, is tarnishing the tools of American democracy by refusing to compromise and leaving the country more vulnerable with revenge layoffs that threaten to undermine critical national security agencies.
After Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who put loyalty to the Constitution ahead of his duty to the president, three other senior Pentagon officials were either fired or resigned. Among them is the department’s top political official, James Anderson, who has resigned and is replaced by retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata, whose nomination for the position earlier this summer fell after the KFile CNN has reported on his numerous Islamophobic and offensive comments in the past.
Sources told Barbara Starr and the CNN Pentagon team that the layoffs could be motivated by Esper and her team’s refusal of a withdrawal from Afghanistan that would take place before the required field conditions were met, and other pending security issues.
“It’s very disturbing”
“This is scary, it’s very disturbing,” a defense official told CNN. “These are dictatorial actions”.
A disputed transfer of power could offer an opportunity to American adversaries, especially if overseas there is a belief that there is a disaster in the national security infrastructure. Trump could turn his anger to CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told CNN International on Tuesday that he feared the United States was entering a dangerous period.
“I think (Trump) will be uniquely distracted by world events and national security,” Murphy said. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Pompeo’s comments on transitioning to another Trump administration were “delusional.”
“I think it has devalued its credibility internationally because I think there are very few people, even in the US government, who believe it is,” Bolton said.
Trump’s legal battle, against all odds
Despite Trump’s claims that his second term has been robbed, the president’s lawsuit has so far failed to pursue his efforts to claim massive fraud. The tactic increasingly resembles a political exercise as Trump struggles to accept defeat as Republican senators fearful of the president’s political base refuse to cross it, especially with two ballots in Georgia scheduled for January that will decide control of Your Camera.
Trump’s already tiny chance to change the course of the election is diminishing by the day. Biden now has more than 46,000 votes in Pennsylvania, up 12,000 in Georgia, and has a 14,000-vote lead in Arizona. It is unclear if there are enough votes left in the state of Grand Canyon for the current president to overtake the president-elect.
When the Trump campaign filed a new lawsuit in Michigan, which Biden won with nearly 150,000 votes, its communications director Tim Murtaugh said, “We believe President Trump will eventually be declared the winner of this election.”
“Far from nowhere”
But Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election advocate, said the Trump campaign “was far from nowhere” in its attempt to overturn the election result.
“To win lawsuits, they have to stake enough outcomes to change the outcome of elections in individual states and none of the lawsuits they have filed across the country come close to doing so in any state,” Ginsberg said in “The Situation Room »on CNN.
Yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday deepened his insistence that Trump was in his right to file his grievances.
“I think we should stop complaining and not act like it’s extraordinary,” said the recently re-elected Kentucky Republican.
“We will get through this period and swear by the winner on January 20, 2021, just as we have done every four years since 1793”.
While many observers believe McConnell is playing a long-term political game, with Georgia’s runoff and 2022 mid-term elections in mind, the silence of Republican senators encourages Trump’s intransigence.
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The world has already moved on
But while Republican lawmakers are unwilling to break away from the president, many world leaders are moving to embrace Biden, including some who saw themselves as the president’s ideological counterparts.
Biden’s campaign released statements about the president-elect’s calls with the leaders of France, Germany and Ireland. Biden also spoke to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose populist leanings made him a good fit with Trump. Johnson promised to work with Biden in a post-COVID-19 era.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who joined Trump for their common strongman tendencies, also released a public message congratulating Biden on his “electoral success”. And Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – who has a close and controversial relationship with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner – sent Biden a cable broadcast of congratulations on “His Excellency’s victory in the presidential election.” .
Biden said he had a simple message for all world leaders: “Let them know America is back.”
Barbara Starr, Zachary Cohen and Ryan Brown of CNN contributed to this story.
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