sign in sign up
<<
Home , Concession (politics), Maggie Haberman, Michael Barbaro, Mitch McConnell, Roy Blunt

President Trump’s Refusal to Concede the Election: A Lesson Plan on the Peaceful Transfer of Power in a Democracy

Text 1: The Daily | A Non-Transfer of Power (Listen from 0:00-8:36 or read the ​ ​ transcript excerpt below.) Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Andy Mills, Michael Simon Johnson, and Leslye Davis; and edited by Lisa Tobin and Alix Spiegel

Archived Recording (CROWD CHANTING) Thank you, George!

Archived Recording (George H.W. Bush) Thank you so much. Now, here’s the way I see it. Here’s the way we see it, and the country should see it, that the people have spoken and we respect the majesty of the democratic system. [MUSIC] I just called Clinton over in Little Rock and offered my congratulations. He did run a strong campaign. I wish him well in the White House.

Archived Recording (John Mccain) Senator Obama and I have had and argued our differences and he has prevailed. No doubt, many of those differences remain. These are difficult times for our country. And I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to help him lead us through the many challenges we face. I urge all Americans — [APPLAUSE] — to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to come together.

Michael Barbaro From , I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today —

Archived Recording I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction. But chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.

Michael Barbaro — Maggie Haberman on why the traditional transfer of power is not happening this year, and the implications of that delay. It’s Friday, November 13.

Maggie, what usually happens when someone has been declared the winner of a presidential election in the ?

Maggie Haberman So Michael, normally what happens is the media, various outlets, make calls on election night, or shortly after, declaring a winner.

Archived Recording () My congratulations to Senator Kennedy for his fine race in this campaign.

Maggie Haberman The person who has lost concedes.

Archived Recording (Herbert Humphrey) I have lost. Mr. Nixon has won. The democratic process has worked its will. So now let’s get on with the urgent task of uniting our country.

Maggie Haberman There is usually a phone call between the two.

Archived Recording A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Senator to congratulate him — [CROWD BOOING] Please. — To congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love.

Maggie Haberman And then that concession allows the formal transfer of power to begin.

Archived Recording (George H.W. Bush) I want the country to know that our entire administration will work closely with his team to ensure the smooth transition of power. There is important work to be done, and America must always come first. So we will get behind this new president and wish him well.

Maggie Haberman Within days, there is often a formal meeting between the outgoing president and the incoming president.

Archived Recording (George W. Bush) Last night I extended an invitation to the president-elect and Mrs. Obama to come to the White House.

Maggie Haberman These kinds of meetings have happened even after the hardest-fought contests.

Archived Recording (George W. Bush) It’ll be a stirring sight to watch President Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House.

Maggie Haberman In 2008, when you had President Obama running against George W. Bush’s record, Bush still invited Obama in when he won.

Archived Recording (George W. Bush) I told the president-elect he can count on complete cooperation from my administration as he makes the transition to the White House.

Archived Recording (Barack Obama) I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night —

Maggie Haberman In 2016 —

Archived Recording (Barack Obama) — to congratulate him on winning the election. And I had a chance to invite him to come to the White House tomorrow.

Maggie Haberman — after questioned whether President Obama was a legitimate president by creating a lie about his birthplace —

Archived Recording (Barack Obama) We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country.

Maggie Haberman — President Obama still sat with him for a 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office to demonstrate his continuity of government.

Archived Recording (Barack Obama) Now, it is no secret that the president-elect and I have some pretty significant differences. But remember, eight years ago, President Bush and I had some pretty significant differences. But President Bush’s team could not have been more professional or more gracious in making sure we had a smooth transition so that we could hit the ground running.

Archived Recording () I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside. And may God bless his stewardship of this country.

Maggie Haberman Even in elections where there have been bitter court fights —

Archived Recording Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen.

Maggie Haberman

— like the 2000 recount election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Archived Recording Yet, it came, and now it has ended — resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy.

Maggie Haberman You had Al Gore accept the results, even though Democrats were incredibly upset about them. And this acceptance of the result is a hugely important signal to voters that people should have faith in the process and that democratic norms are being respected.

Michael Barbaro So Maggie, these are the rituals around the transfer of power meant for public consumption. What usually happens behind the scenes during this time period?

Maggie Haberman When there is a concession, the administrator of the General Services Administration of the federal government puts forward what’s called an ascertainment. And that means they have ascertained who the next president will be, who the president-elect is. And that puts in place a pot of money being available to the incoming president, incoming administration, and allows agencies to begin the process of the transfer of power — briefing books, meetings, so-called “landing teams” or “beachhead teams,” as they are often called for the incoming administration, meeting with agency officials to talk about what work needs to be done, how they want to handle the transfer of power. In the case of , there are a lot of people who have been in government before, which always helps. But they still need to figure out where things stand on a whole range of issues going forward.

Michael Barbaro And what has been happening this year in the now six days since Joe Biden was declared the president-elect?

Maggie Haberman So basically, Michael, everything that I just described as what normally happens has not happened. None of it.

Michael Barbaro And what has happened instead?

Maggie Haberman What’s happened, instead, Michael, is President Trump has refused to concede. He has been in the Oval Office tweeting, very frequently, news clips or things he sees on that he insists affirm his belief that he has won the election. But that has meant that everything is in limbo. Joe Biden has not started getting intelligence briefings. There has not been agency handoffs with the incoming team. There has been a delay in the number of appointments that

Biden has announced. And we don’t have full clarity on this, because of security reasons. But there might have been a delay in Joe Biden getting the full complement of Secret Service protection that an incoming president gets.

Michael Barbaro So suffice it to say, this is not the usual transition. This is, in fact, the complete opposite of the usual transition. In fact, this isn’t really a transition at all.

Maggie Haberman Correct. There is, so far, no transition. There is just a standstill.

Archived Recording () I’m here tonight to stand with President Trump. He stood with me. He’s the reason we’re going to have a Senate majority. He helped Senate Republicans who are going to pick up House seats because of the campaign that President Trump won.

Maggie Haberman And so far, the president is being supported in this by a number of top Republican officials.

Archived Recording Senator, have you congratulated Vice President Biden yet?

Archived Recording () No.

Archived Recording There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.

Maggie Haberman That includes Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority leader.

Archived Recording (Mitch Mcconnell) Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.

Maggie Haberman That includes a number of 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls.

Archived Recording () By throwing the observers out, by clouding the vote counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal an election. It is lawless and they need to follow the law.

Maggie Haberman

The vast majority of Republicans are either not contradicting what the president is doing or mouthing words that sound as if they’re being supportive, because most Republicans are afraid to go against him on this.

Text 2: Trump Rebuffs Biden Transition Team, Setting Off Virus and National ​ Security Risks (excerpted) ​ By David E. Sanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s refusal to allow President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his transition staff access to government offices, secure communications and classified briefings prompted growing warnings on Thursday, including from Republicans, that keeping Mr. Biden in the dark potentially endangers the country.

On Capitol Hill, several Senate Republicans insisted that Mr. Biden should at least be given access to the President’s Daily Brief, the compendium of the nation’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets and assessments of threats like terrorist plots and cyberattack vulnerabilities. Their call amounted to an acknowledgment that Mr. Biden would be declared the victor in the election.

“I don’t think they need to know everything,” Senator of , a member of the Senate Republican leadership, said of Mr. Biden’s advisers. “I think they do need to know some things, and national security would be one of them.”

“President-elect Biden should be receiving intelligence briefings right now — that is really important,” said Senator , Republican of Maine, a member of the Intelligence Committee and one of the few Senate Republicans to publicly acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory. “It’s probably the most important part of the transition.”

Giving Mr. Biden and his top aides access to the daily briefing, as Mr. Trump got right after his election four years ago, would address only a fraction of the problem. Mr. Biden will confront an array of complex dilemmas: bruised relationships with foreign allies, a weak economy and a sluggish recovery, perhaps the most high-risk period yet of the coronavirus and a need to distribute a vaccine to 330 million Americans.

The president-elect’s team is concerned that it is being shut out of planning for the vaccine distribution, a huge undertaking that the incoming administration expects to inherit the moment Mr. Biden is sworn in. His advisers said they have not had access to the details of Warp Speed, the project that has vaccine distribution planning well underway, and understand little about its workings.

It is focusing on logistical challenges and policy questions, one senior Biden adviser said, like how to prioritize who gets a vaccine and how to make distribution equitable along racial and socioeconomic lines — a priority of Mr. Biden’s, but one rarely discussed by Mr. Trump.

“Every day Senate Republicans continue to indulge the president in the delusion he didn’t just lose the election, they are undermining faith in our democracy, putting our national security at risk and impeding the response to the Covid-19 health and economic crises,” said Senator of New York, the Democratic leader.

Mr. Trump’s stonewalling is already creating modest risks in the president-elect’s dealings with foreign leaders: Mr. Biden made his first contacts on unsecured telephone lines, without State Department translators or briefings about what those leaders might seek from him.

Text 3: Trump’s Post-Election Tactics Put Him in Unsavory Company ​ (excerpted) By Andrew Higgins

MOSCOW — When the strongman ruler of Belarus declared an implausible landslide victory in an election in August, and had himself sworn in for a sixth term as president, the United States and other Western nations denounced what they said was brazen defiance of the voters’ will.

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s victory, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month, was “fraud.” Mr. Pompeo added: “We’ve opposed the fact that he’s now inaugurated himself. We know what the people of Belarus want. They want something different.”

Just a month on, Mr. Pompeo’s boss, President Trump, is now borrowing from Mr. Lukashenko’s playbook, joining a club of truculent leaders who, regardless of what voters decide, declare themselves the winners of elections.

That club counts as its members far more dictators, tyrants and potentates than leaders of what used to be known as the “free world” — countries that, led by Washington, have for decades lectured others on the need to hold elections and respect the result.

The parallel is not exact. Mr. Trump participated in a free and fair democratic election. Most autocrats defy voters before they even vote, excluding real rivals from the ballot and swamping the airwaves with one-sided coverage.

But when they do hold genuinely competitive votes and the result goes against them, they often ignore the result, denouncing it as the work of traitors, criminals and foreign saboteurs, and therefore invalid. By refusing to accept the results of last week’s election and working to delegitimize the vote, Mr. Trump is following a similar strategy.

There is little indication that Mr. Trump can overcome the laws and institutions that ensure the verdict of American voters will carry the day. The country has a free press, a strong and independent judiciary, election officials dedicated to an honest counting of the votes and a strong political opposition, none of which exists in Belarus or .

Still, the United States has never before had to force an incumbent to concede a fair defeat at the polls. And merely by raising the possibility that he would have to be forced out of office, Mr. Trump has shattered the bedrock democratic tradition of a seamless transition.

The damage already done by Mr. Trump’s obduracy could be lasting. Ivan Krastev, an expert on East and Central Europe at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, said Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede would “create a new model” for like-minded populists in Europe and elsewhere.

“When Trump won in 2016 the lesson was that they could trust democracy,” he said. “Now, they won’t trust democracy, and will do everything and anything to stay in power.” In what he called “the Lukashenko scenario,” leaders will still want to hold elections but “never lose.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been doing that for two decades.