Trump and His Team Are ‘Laughing’ at Biden’s Commitment to Decorum
Donald Trump and his incoming administration officials think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suckers. They’re not shy about saying it.
Within the past month, Biden, Harris, and the current administration have repeatedly vowed an orderly, peaceful, fully cooperative transfer of power between Biden and Trump — a twice-impeached former president and convicted felon whom the president, vice president, and Democratic leaders regularly denounced as a “fascist” tyrant and clear threat to the constitutional order.
It hasn’t just been the legal transfer and procedures to which Democrats have committed themselves. Biden has promised to attend Trump’s 2025 inauguration, even though Trump refused to grant him the same grace after the 2020 election. Of course, then-President Trump actively sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory and even helped foment a violent coup at the U.S. Capitol as part of his monthslong effort to cling to power.
Not long after the election this early November, Biden hosted Trump at the White House for a pleasant photo opportunity. The president and vice president congratulated Trump, and Biden told him “welcome back” to his face, as the two men sat down for the news cameras, as if they were old pals who had just resolved a mildly heated argument.
These actions are all far, far above and beyond what Trump and his first administration were willing to do during the last U.S. presidential transition for Biden — including in its commitment to basic decorum and photo ops that don’t even technically affect the legal transfer of power.
And — in the same way that top Trump adviser Stephen Miller privately found it funny that Biden actually preserved some of his and Trump’s preferred immigration crackdown methods — members of Team Trump find this asymmetrical level of commitment to norms, well, funny.
“Some of us have been laughing about it,” an incoming Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone. “[Democrats] spend all this time calling Donald Trump a Nazi and Hitler, and now it’s just: ‘Smile for the camera!’”
These sentiments of gleefully rejoicing and sneering at, as one close Trump ally puts it, the Democrats’ almost performative “capitulation” to Trump — who campaigned on a grossly authoritarian platform that includes wielding the federal apparatus to exact revenge operations on prominent political enemies — are widely shared in Trumpland, according to four sources close to the president-elect or working on the Trump transition.
In recent weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter, Trump himself has privately mocked Biden for being so “nice” after Harris lost the election, with the president-elect sarcastically joking that he would have done the same thing for his Democratic opponents.
Throughout his campaign, Trump regularly winked and nodded at the possibility that — should he not win a decisive victory in the general election — he would fall back on his 2020 playbook and reject the will of the voters this year, too.
Fomenting an attempted coup against the certification of the Electoral College was already a clear enough signal of Trump’s intentions, but in the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, Trump was also openly uncooperative with transition officials and the incoming Biden administration.
The now president-elect waited until almost two months after the election to officially concede that he would not be returning to the White House. He fled D.C. — which was left in a state of outright militarization following the attack on the Capitol — and refused to attend any events related to the transition of power, including the inauguration.
Trump’s campaign waited seven weeks before beginning the most rudimentary discussions about a transition. Biden was denied the standard books typically authorized for incoming presidents, including access to daily national security briefings, funds to run the transition, and office space to begin staging the new administration. Even as it became crystal clear that Trump had no legitimate claim to a second term, the White House continued to vet potential nominees and appointees as if they would remain in power.
By contrast, the Biden administration has seemingly bent over backward to avoid giving the incoming Trump administration any opening to claim they are obstructing his return to power. Earlier this month the two met at the White House to discuss the logistics of the transfer. Special Counsel Jack Smith — who headed the now defunct federal prosecutions against Trump — has even begun shuttering his own criminal cases into Trump, saving Trump some time from following through on his campaign promise to fire Smith upon retaking the White House.
If there’s anything that will slow Trump’s transition, it’s his own camp’s refusal to sign the standard financial and ethics agreements required for agencies involved in the transition to begin authorizing the release of resources for the incoming administration. His team finally relented to some extent last week.
Earlier this year, Trump said it was “ridiculous” that he had to leave the White House. In November, days before the election, Trump said outright, “I shouldn’t have left.”
The difference here is that — pleasant or not — the outgoing administration has a democratic and legal and civic responsibility to not be like Trump and his loyalists. The peaceful transfer of power tradition is a central pillar of the democratic process, and messing with it poses a destabilizing blow to the American experiment.
On the other hand, nobody is legally or morally obligated to attend January’s celebratory inauguration in Washington, D.C., or cheese for a photo op, or act publicly chummy with someone who their political party had (correctly) diagnosed as a bloodthirsty, wannabe authoritarian — and a threat to basic rights, vulnerable communities, and the democratic order and health of the nation.
Should Biden refuse to grant Trump his physical participation in the performance of the inauguration pageantry, the outgoing president would be far more justified in his reasoning than his predecessor.
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