Joe Biden faces historic challenges when he enters the White House on Jan. 20: a raging pandemic, persistently high unemployment, simmering tensions with China and Russia — and a predecessor who won\u2019t go away.<\/p>\n
Aware of the chaos and distraction Donald Trump has proved he can muster, the president-elect and his advisers have developed a strategy they believe is the only way to neutralize the threat: ignore him.<\/p>\n
One lesson of Biden\u2019s winning presidential campaign, they say, is that there\u2019s little incentive to engage with Trump and that his penchant for spectacle is wearing thin with the American people. The tension will reach a head-on Jan. 6, when Congress formally ratifies Biden\u2019s victory as Trump\u2019s supporters’ wage protests both on the streets of Washington, egged on by the president, and within the House and Senate.<\/p>\n
Biden has been \u201cadamant that we were not going to get down in the gutter with Donald Trump every day,\u201d said adviser Kate Bedingfield. \u201cThat\u2019s not who he is, and that\u2019s not what the American people want to see in a president.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the incoming administration is going to have trouble ignoring Trump, who\u2019s poised to remain at least an aggravation to Biden. After refusing to concede defeat and declaring the election he lost to be illegitimate, he\u2019s made clear he doesn\u2019t plan to quietly retire, and has told associates he\u2019ll run for president again in 2024.<\/p>\n
For generations, U.S. presidents leaving the office to a successor of the opposition party have yielded power gracefully — even those defeated for re-election after a single term. But Trump\u2019s attitude has set up the most awkward transfer of power in modern history and threatens to hamstring Biden as he confronts a long list of crises.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is unprecedented territory,\u201d said Steve Israel, a former eight-term Democratic congressman from New York and director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. \u201cWe\u2019ve never had a former president who is dedicated to the proposition of the failure of his successor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biden\u2019s team regards Trump\u2019s attempts to overturn the will of voters — including his effort to recruit Republican lawmakers to challenge the congressional certification of the election results on Wednesday — as doing more harm to the outgoing president\u2019s legacy than to Biden.<\/p>\n
And they believe there are already signs that Trump\u2019s bully pulpit and ability to command public attention is eroding, including waning media coverage of his election-related antics and congressional Republicans\u2019 willingness to buck the president in recent legislative battles, including the first override of a Trump veto.<\/p>\n
But Biden\u2019s strategy to deprive Trump of attention will likely face frequent and immediate tests.<\/p>\n
The outgoing president, sensing that his remaining power lies with still-formidable base supporters, has spent recent weeks threatening Republican lawmakers who dare to cross him.<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly emphasized that he captured 74 million votes, a record for a defeated presidential candidate, and asserted that his presence on the ballot helped Republicans win election and re-election to federal offices.<\/p>\n
\u201cRepublicans in the Senate so quickly forget,\u201d he tweeted on Dec. 22. \u201cRight now they would be down 8 seats without my backing them in the last Election.\u201d In the same post, Trump predicted that John Thune, the number two Senate Republican, would lose a 2022<\/a> GOP primary challenge, \u201cpolitical career over!!!\u201d….. (BOSTON GLOBE)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joe Biden faces historic challenges when he enters the White House on Jan. 20: a raging pandemic, persistently high unemployment, simmering tensions with China and Russia — and a predecessor who won\u2019t go away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17497,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5,4,80],"tags":[240],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17496"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maremont.me\/tr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}