Newsweek - USA (2020-11-27)

NEWSWEEK.COM 27

“The Trump presidency is not a normal presidency;

IT’S AN OUTLIER and it’s entirely possible that

this transition will not be normal, either.”

ELECTION 2020

presidential scholars and activists who share the

Biden team’s concerns about what the current presi-

dent might do to leave his mark after being rejected

by the American people. Yet since 1801 when Thomas

Jefferson took the reins from political foe John Ad-

ams, the smooth transfer of power between parties

has been regarded as one of the most important

American political rituals, a fraught moment that

relies on the honor, patriotism and regard for prece-

dent of the presidents involved, says Rebecca Lissner,

a national security expert and professor of operation-

al strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. The process,

she says, is one of the defining differences between

Western-style democracies and autocratic rule.

What could upset that process this time? “There’s

a range [of possibilities] from incompetence to

outright sabotage,” says Lissner, author of An Open

World: How America Can Win The Contest for Twen-

ty-First Century Order (Yale University Press, 2020).

“You could imagine a wide range of actions that a

lame-duck Trump could take to vastly undermine

his successor, in effect, locking in certain policy

decisions that would be exceptionally difficult or

costly to reverse. He could withdraw from NATO or

take assertive actions with regards to Iran or China.

There’s nothing stopping President Trump from

even starting a war.”

Jeff Timmer, former GOP chair in Michigan and

co-founder of the anti-Trump PAC The Lincoln Proj-

ect, agrees: “Every time people have said, ‘Oh, no one

would do that,’ Trump says, ‘Hold my beer.’”

Normal vs. Trump

the most imminent threat, transition experts

say, is President Trump’s refusal to participate

or allow his agency leaders to help—a threat he

undermine the transition. Some in the Biden camp

point out the order could conceivably result in

Trump issuing hundreds of pink slips between now

and Inauguration Day, which might throw the work

of a long list of government agencies from the Cen-

ters For Disease Control to the Environmental Pro-

tection Agency to the Social Security Administration,

into chaos. Already, Trump fired Defense Secretary

Mark Esper on November 9th and began appointing

loyalists to hard-to-dislodge civil service positions

across a variety of agencies.

“These things are a declaration of war,” a Biden

transition consultant told Newsweek on the condi-

tion of anonymity. “He is turning this into the tran-

sition from hell.”

There is no shortage of Beltway insiders,

NEXT CHAPTER
As President Donald
Trump’s time in the
White House winds
down, he continues to
bring his unique brand of
bravado and chaos to the
process of transferring
power. Meanwhile, the
transition team of
President-Elect Joe Biden
(below) gets on with the
business of setting up
a new administration.