Donald Trump stepped out of the White House for the first time in six days on Wednesday as Americans strained to interpret a flurry of sudden personnel changes inside the administration, including at the Pentagon, while top Republicans refused to admit that Joe Biden had won the presidency.
Instead of ushering in a becalmed moment of transition, the US election eight days ago has given way to escalating concerns over the president’s shocking visible effort to cling to power – and over top Republicans’ failure to dispute the president’s wild claims of election fraud.
The proportion of Biden’s victory in the popular vote crept up to 50.8% on Wednesday, the highest percentage for a challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. Judges in six states had thrown out at least 13 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign to challenge the vote while agreeing to hear zero. There is every indication that Biden will be inaugurated on 20 January.
But continued leaks about the Trump team’s long-shot strategies for overturning the election result, and references such as one by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on Tuesday to a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration”, fed a sense of alarm that America was witnessing more than just hardball politics, cynical fundraising or Trumpian sour grapes.
“What Donald Trump is attempting to do has a name: coup d’état,” said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University specializing in authoritarianism, on Twitter. “Poorly organized though it might seem, it is not bound to fail. It must be made to fail.
“Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless.”
Trump did not deliver remarks to reporters en route to a Veteran’s Day ceremony at Arlington national cemetery on Wednesday, where he stood with the vice-president, Mike Pence in the rain. Biden and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, attended a Veteran’s Day ceremony in Delaware.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
