The United States only has one president at a time, but when the White House changes hands, the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day is as close as our system ever gets to a gray area. This is even truer amid the longest legal challenge of presidential election results in history, exceeding the 2000 Florida recount drama insofar as it stretches past the federal “safe harbor” deadline by which states must finalize their electors.
Still, President-elect Joe Biden has commenced work putting together a new administration, and President Trump is, despite Twitter shouts of defiance, giving every appearance of closing up shop. In the meantime, there are last-minute pardons to be issued, stray judges to be confirmed, troops to be drawn down overseas, and a pandemic continuing to go on.
The transition of power, as with so much else in 2020, has been shaped by COVID-19. Trump is set to leave office as vaccines finally reach the public.
“But whichever the next administration is will really benefit by what we’ve been able to do with this incredible science, the doctors, all of the people that came up, the lab technicians. The work that’s been done is incredible, and it will be incredible for the next administration,” he said at an Operation Warp Speed event at the White House. “And hopefully, the next administration will be the Trump administration because you can’t steal hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Trump’s comments came in response to a media question about why representatives of the Biden team were not present at an event celebrating the new vaccines. It is one of many queries about whether this reluctant transition will fully prepare the Biden administration to take over its efforts to manage the outbreak — assuming, as the president might say, that no late legal maneuver prevents the change.
Either way, who takes credit for the vaccine is important in Washington.
“And we will have 40 million doses by the end of the year, which is a tremendous achievement — not just to have gotten a vaccine in this time but to have produced 40 million in advance,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said. “It’s having a businessman as president. It’s the Trump vaccine.”
Biden is stressing that his administration will take the lead in implementing the vaccine during a time of bipartisan “anti-vax” sentiment. The president-elect has pledged to administer some 100 million doses of the vaccine during his first 100 days in office.
“I’m absolutely convinced that in 100 days, we can change the course of the disease and change life in America for the better,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. Dr. Anthony Fauci is staying on as one of Biden’s top coronavirus advisers.
“No one outside Washington cares who gets the credit,” a Republican operative said. But inside Washington, it is a debate that predominates the transition.
“Out of our collective pain, we’re going to find collective purpose to control the pandemic, to save lives, and to heal as a nation,” Biden said.
Biden has also chosen California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and has tapped Dr. Vivek Murthy to serve as surgeon general. But Biden is already finding that it won’t be easy to pick his preferred choices when the best-case scenario for Democrats is a Senate that is split 50-50 and organized in their favor by Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
The Left has already vetoed Michele Flournoy, long the front-runner for secretary of defense, as too hawkish. Biden’s actual nominee, retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, may not fare much better as some on the Left are balking at granting yet another recent former general a waiver to assume a civilian leadership post at the Pentagon.
Trump has had trouble filling that position, too, having sacked two defense secretaries, including one near the end of his term, arousing conspiracy theories that he was planning a coup. The first of those defense secretaries is causing Biden and Austin problems. James Mattis was a retired general who had to receive a waiver to become Trump’s first secretary of defense. Some Democrats are fearful this is becoming a pattern. Biden, by contrast, invoked Mattis as a precedent in an opinion piece defending his choice of Austin in the Atlantic.
As Biden tries to fill his Cabinet, Trump will be on the lookout for remaining judicial vacancies as he also grants pardons and seeks to fulfill campaign promises on troop drawdowns, especially in Afghanistan, a war Biden will nevertheless become the fourth president to oversee.
