Former Vice President Joe Biden took the helm as President-elect over the weekend, but President Donald Trump has yet to acknowledge Biden’s victory, reportedly balking at his advisors’ requests to concede and begin a peaceful transition of power, and pledging continued legal challenges in several closely contested states that decided the race. Peter Kadzis, GBH Senior Editor, and Adam Reilly, GBH News political reporter, co-hosts of The Scrum podcast, joined Joe Mathieu on Morning Edition today to discuss how the transition between the Trump and Biden administrations might play out over the coming weeks.
“The President’s failure to concede doesn’t mean the government itself won’t move forward. That the people who have to sign the papers, if you willl, the people that have to have the meetings won’t have them,” Kadzis said. “We’re in new territory, though, and we honestly don’t know.”
Kadzis speculated that Trump might “triangulate,” weighing how his conduct during this transition period might affect his ability to make money after leaving office, start the media company he is rumored to be developing, and even run for president again in 2024. “Those are the three things that I think might ultimately be going through Trump’s mind,” Kadzis said. “And if you can read Trump’s mind, Joe, you’re a better man than I am.”
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Mathieu noted how quickly Biden’s victory was embraced by many everyday citizens and world leaders alike over the weekend, as people took to the streets to celebrate and heads of state, including Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, posted their congratulations on social media. And yet calls for legal challenges from Trump and his supporters, and a refusal to concede the election, persist. “Is this rapid evolution going to continue in the days ahead?” Mathieu asked.
“Despite the fervent belief of those supporters that wrong was done, we just don’t have established facts to prove it,” Reilly said. He pointed to the “article of faith” between Trump and his supporters, in which the president said repeatedly leading up to the election that the only way he could lose was if the election was fraudulent, and many of his supporters believed — and continue to believe — that to be true. “But that doesn’t mean the facts are on their side,” Reilly said.
He went on: “Maybe the smoking gun is out there and we just haven’t seen it, but until we do, it’s appropriate to say 'Joe Biden won a big victory in the popular vote, more importantly he won a big victory in the electoral college, and he is going to be the president.”
As for the presidential inauguration on Janury 20, 2021, Kadzis said that he “wouldn’t be surprised if Trump takes a pass,” bucking tradition and opting to skip the event altogether. He noted that, while here in Massachusetts the mood over the weekend was celebratory, “the nation is even more clearly polarized than it was before the election.”
