After the US vote

It has been over two weeks since the US presidential election, we now know that America will have a new leader on January 20. Although President Trump is refusing to publicly accept defeat, recent reports suggest he is only doing this to scam donations for his campaign’s legal fund into his own pocket. No legal challenges, no legal defence donations to pocket.

President-elect Joe Biden’s team has already started work on the transition, announcing his preliminary coronavirus taskforce and a host of executive orders that he will sign as soon as he takes office. His coronavirus taskforce already shows he means business, with all but one of the members having a medical degree and an extensive background in either virology or public medicine. For comparison, Trump’s official coronavirus taskforce is led by Vice President Mike Pence, whose refusal to listen to medical experts during his governorship of Indiana led to an HIV outbreak in the state. Overall, only eight of Trump’s 27-member team are medical doctors.

The executive orders mostly deal with undoing Trump’s efforts to loosen environmental controls. That is not to say that the Trump administration is making this easy. They are making every effort to damage the Biden presidency through comical pettiness. Trump appointees are not allowing Biden access to funding earmarked for incoming presidents to begin setting up their administrations to hit the ground running. Biden has also not been authorised to receive the Presidential Daily Brief, as is customary, to familiarise him with top-secret information.

Trump lackeys such as Secretary Pompeo are also refusing to admit that Trump lost, even though the president’s lawyers are being laughed out of courts across the country for their frivolous voter fraud cases. Meanwhile, Biden also faces the possibility of having a hostile Senate — Democrats control the House, but they must win runoff elections for both Georgia Senate seats on January 5 if they are to take control of the upper house.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2020.

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