Joe Biden has been waiting patiently for the cathartic “Hallelujah” moment when all of America finally acknowledges his election victory. In a rational world, Donald Trump and the Republican Party would accept, however ungraciously, that there is no legal way to overturn a free and fair election, and that the disputed states will confirm their original results.
By now the president-elect knows Trump will never let that happen. For the first time, Biden showed a flash of anger last week. “Let me choose my words,” he steadied himself, before unleashing a battery of criticism. Trump was behaving with “incredible irresponsibility” and sending “a horrible message about who we are as a country”.
At his core, Biden believes his mission — the very reason he won — is to be president of the “united” states of America. It is not in his nature to brawl with his defeated opponent. Although he did not rule out legal action to force Trump to green-light the transition, Biden said he would prefer to co-operate with “our Republican colleagues”.
Has the veteran deal-maker brought a knife to a gunfight? Four years ago, Trump declared in his “American carnage” inaugural speech: “The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.”
The danger of pursuing a softly-softly course is that allegations of fraud risk crippling Biden’s presidency before he makes it to his own inauguration. Should he then angrily accuse Trump himself of inflicting carnage on America? Or would a street fight play in Trump’s favour? What is Biden’s team advising him to do?
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The former White House counsel Bob Bauer, a senior Biden adviser, has dismissed Trump’s alternative facts as “theatrics, not really lawsuits”. Nobody doubts that on January 20 there will be a new occupant of the White House. The Biden camp believes this will be the best way to ���show and tell” who is in charge — and set the tone for his administration.
Steve Kerrigan, the head of Barack Obama’s 2013 inaugural committee, said: “You can try to chase a false narrative, or show people what kind of a president you are.” Biden’s inaugural speech will be “a chance to demonstrate that the country will have a president who is focused on them and [will] do the best job possible”.
Jonathan Rauch of the Washington-based Brookings Institution agrees this is the best tactic for Biden.
“Disinformation relies on being denied. When people say ‘ABC isn’t true’, it spreads the lie,” he said. Yet he fears that playing by the rules will not be enough to counter the “firehose of falsehoods” pouring out of the White House: “Trump is the best in the world — better than Putin — at disinformation.”
In an article in Persuasion magazine last week, Rauch wrote: “What Trump and his supporters are up to should be thought of not as a litigation campaign that is likely to fail but as an information warfare campaign that is likely to succeed — and indeed [is] succeeding already.”
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This is true. In my neck of the woods, in Pennsylvania, everybody I have encountered believes Biden stole the election. By this, I don’t mean disgruntled voters from whom I hoped to obtain an inflammatory quote or two. I mean delightful people like Al, the heating engineer, Kerry, the second-hand car saleswoman, and George, the handyman, who are helping me to settle here.
Al can’t abide CNN, abandoned Fox News for not being sufficiently Trumpian and now tunes in to Newsmax, whose top story, as I write, is: “Trump team will prove election case ‘within two weeks’.”
Kerry is adamant 900,000 votes were fraudulently cast in Pennsylvania. She does not own a television but gets her information off the internet. George and Al think civil war is brewing.
They consider themselves fully informed about the “corrupt” voting machines “from China and Venezuela”, insist they have seen photographic proof of vote-tampering, and cannot fathom how they went to bed on election night with Trump in the lead and woke up to a projected Biden win.
Surrounded as they are by other Trump admirers, they refuse to believe that more than 50% of Americans preferred a man with allegedly impaired faculties, who “didn’t even campaign”, to their White House hero. They pay attention to the news but they follow a completely different ecosystem from that of Biden supporters.
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The level of disinformation is Alice-through-the-looking-glass, off-the-charts disorienting. While Biden is fighting with conventional weapons, Trump is pursuing asymmetrical warfare.
The pressure on Republican officials to bend to Trump’s will is intense. Emily Murphy, 47, a little-known functionary with the Dickensian title of administrator at the General Services Administration, has so far refused to sign off on the transition and declare Biden the winner.
“She absolutely feels like she’s in a hard place. She’s afraid on multiple levels. It’s a terrible situation,” a friend and former colleague told CNN. The obvious answer, according to the Biden camp, is that she should simply do the right thing.
There are also well-founded fears that Trump’s supporters will try to disrupt the new president’s inauguration by pouring into Washington claiming “fraud” while Democrats stay away because of Covid-19 restrictions. Biden’s swearing-in is likely to have a very select guest list, according to Kerrigan, while the customary celebrations and inaugural “balls” take place on Zoom.
The model could be a mixture of Ronald Reagan’s ceremony in January 1985 — which took place in the Capitol rotunda because of the harsh cold — and the lying-in-state of the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and civil rights hero John Lewis.
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That leaves plenty of room outside for hordes of Trump protesters. “They’ll be cold, very cold,” said Kerrigan. “But if they do show up, it’s their right as Americans.”
Back in 2017, George W Bush turned to Hillary Clinton after Trump’s inaugural speech and said: “Well, that was some weird shit.” Whatever Biden does, there is more to come.
