Biden plans to sign a flurry of executive orders after being sworn in on Jan. 20.“He will rejoin the Paris climate accords … and he will reverse President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He will repeal the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing ‘dreamers,’ who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country,” Matt Viser, Seung Min Kim and Annie Linskey report. “Biden’s top advisers have spent months quietly working on how best to implement his agenda, with hundreds of transition officials preparing to get to work inside various federal agencies. They have assembled a book filled with his campaign commitments to help guide their early decisions. … Biden has said that he plans to immediately reverse Trump’s rollback of 100 public health and environmental rules that the Obama administration had in place. He would also institute new ethics guidelines at the White House, and he has pledged to sign an executive order the first day in office saying that no member of his administration could influence any Justice Department investigations. … /cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/XFUIV4MUTNBGBKI2O4YW32REU4.jpg) "There has also been a recognition of those around him that he may have to lean more on executive actions than he had once hoped. ‘The policy team, the transition policy teams, are focusing now very much on executive power,’ said a Biden ally … A Republican-held Senate — or even one with a narrow Democratic majority — probably will affect Biden’s Cabinet picks given the Senate’s power to confirm nominees. One option being discussed is appointing Cabinet members in an acting capacity, a tactic that Trump also used. … Biden’s ambitious plans to curb the coronavirus face big hurdles. “Biden has laid out a far more muscular federal approach than Trump, saying he would urge state and local leaders to implement mask mandates if needed, create a panel on the model of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board to scale up testing and lay out detailed plans to distribute vaccines to 330 million people after they are greenlighted as safe and effective,” Yasmeen Abutaleb and Laurie McGinley report. “Another thing that Biden can do without Congress is … begin holding briefings with government scientists and health experts, as he has repeatedly vowed to do. He also can implement mask mandates on all federal property. But other aspects of his response will be more difficult in a fractured nation. Until there is a widely available vaccine — which is not expected until mid- to late 2021 — much of Biden’s plan depends on persuading people to change their behavior. … Much of Biden’s plan will also require money from Congress, including dramatically ramping up testing and contact tracing and providing schools and businesses with billions of dollars to safely reopen.”
“Biden’s team already has plans on how it will restrict oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters; ratchet up federal mileage standards for cars and SUVs; block pipelines that transport fossil fuels across the country; provide federal incentives to develop renewable power; and mobilize other nations to make deeper cuts in their own carbon emissions,” Juliet Eilperin, Dino Grandoni and Darryl Fears report. “Biden has vowed to eliminate carbon emissions from the electric sector by 2035 and spend $2 trillion on investments ranging from weatherizing homes to developing a nationwide network of charging stations for electric vehicles. That massive investment plan stands a chance only if his party wins two Senate runoff races in Georgia … Still, a number of factors make it easier to enact more-ambitious climate policies than even four years ago. … The price of solar and wind power has dropped, the coal industry has shrunk, and Americans increasingly connect the disasters they’re experiencing in real time.” | ||
Making history
Kamala Harris will be America's first Madame Vice President.“A vice president-elect stepped forward on Saturday, and, for the first time in American history, she was not a man,” Chelsea Janes reports. “Harris, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, is set to become the highest-ranking woman in the nation’s 244-year existence, as well as a high-profile representation of the country’s increasingly diverse composition. … Black women helped propel Harris and Biden to victory by elevating turnout in places like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Those women will finally see themselves represented in the White House as Biden and Harris replace Trump, who started his political career by perpetuating a racist birther lie about Obama and has a long track record of making misogynistic comments." “Harris is now the first Black woman, Asian American and graduate of a historically Black college or university to ascend to one of the nation’s two highest offices,” Janes reports. ”While Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal have risen to prominence in the Republican Party, the South Asian community took to Harris in an entirely different way, providing a major fundraising force and social media support. … Actress Mindy Kaling tweeted: ‘Crying and holding my daughter. ‘look baby, she looks like us.’" For her victory speech on Saturday night, the California senator emerged in all white. It was a nod to the uniform of the suffragists who secured the right to vote for women with the ratification of the 19th Amendment exactly 100 years ago. Harris is 56. Her victory comes 55 years after the Voting Rights Act abolished laws that disenfranchised Black Americans, 36 years after the first woman ran on a presidential ticket, which lost 49 states, and four years after Democrats were devastated by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. | ||
Quote of the day
Harris's win sparked jubilation in Jamaica and India.“During the campaign, Harris delighted some in India by referring to her roots. In her acceptance speech, she mentioned the support she had received from her ‘chittis,’ a Tamil word for aunts. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had forged a close relationship with Trump, paid tribute to Harris’s ‘pathbreaking’ success on Twitter. Jamaica’s prime minister, Andrew Holness, saluted Harris’s ‘monumental accomplishment for women’ as well as her Jamaican heritage,” Joanna Slater reports. "Back in India, Harris’s uncle Balachandran had spent days watching the results on a squat Panasonic television tuned to CNN, his laptop open to Arizona’s ballot-counting website. Now he plans to celebrate with a slice of chocolate cake and a glass of wine — and later with a trip to Washington to see his niece sworn in as vice president.” | ||
How Biden won
Trump’s erratic behavior and failures on the virus doomed his reelection.“The story of Biden’s victory is as much the story of Trump’s defeat — a devastating coda for a leader who has long feared weakness and losing above almost all else, but who became the first one-term president in nearly 30 years,” Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, Viser and Michael Scherer report. “The president finally lost, aides and allies said, because of how he mismanaged the virus. He lost, they said, over the summer, when the virus didn’t go away as he promised; when racial unrest roiled the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s death and protesters ran rampant through the streets; and when federal and local authorities gassed largely peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Square across from the White House so Trump could stage a photo op. And he lost, they said, during a roughly three-week stretch from late September to mid-October, when an angry and brooding Trump heckled and interrupted his way through the first debate and then, several days later, announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. He also lost, aides added, after years of confrontational and incendiary conduct turned off independent voters, who finally said they had seen enough. "The same impulses that helped lift him to victory in 2016 — the outsider ethos; the angry, burn-it-all-down cri de coeur; the fiery and controversial rants; the false reality forged through untruths and deception — contributed to his undoing just four years later. Exhausted voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, who once gave Trump a shot, turned on him … One senior campaign official said the pandemic had two especially deleterious effects: The virus magnified some of Trump’s worst qualities, while also allowing Biden to recede from the spotlight. … "Down the stretch, the Trump campaign placed enormous faith in its massive voter contact and mobilization effort, a project that cost more than $350 million…. In the last week, [Trump] charged through more than two dozen rallies in more than a half-dozen battleground states, including 10 in the final two days. But the problem wasn’t where he was; it was what he said when he was there — offensive riffs, demeaning swipes, fantastical claims that the coronavirus was nearly gone. … "To many, however, [Jared] Kushner bears the ultimate responsibility for Trump’s defeat. … At times, critics say, Kushner was too occupied with his White House portfolio — trying to secure a peace deal in the Middle East, helping to manage the administration’s coronavirus response — to devote the necessary time to overseeing the campaign. ‘He was busy being president,’ quipped one Republican.” The campaign's finance team, led by Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend, was not just unsuccessful. It was an H.R. nightmare, Politico reports: “Donors were horrified by what they described as [Kimberly] Guilfoyle’s lack of professionalism: She frequently joked about her sex life and, at one fundraiser, offered a lap dance to the donor who gave the most money.” The story says communication between the campaign and the Republican National Committee broke down for much of the final stretch, with the RNC running its own commercials after deeming the Trump campaign’s low quality. And a pro-Trump super PAC also took too long to materialize and, by the time casino mogul Sheldon Adelson stepped forward to fund it, the president had been swamped by pro-Biden ads. Trump never had the support or approval of a majority of Americans or voters.He will become the fourth president in U.S. history to never win the popular vote in a presidential election. In four years, Trump’s approval rate never hit 50 percent, except in polls from Republican-aligned pollsters. (Philip Bump) He is just the 10th president in U.S. history to be denied a second term. He's only the third incumbent to be denied a second full term in the last century, joining George H.W. Bush in 1992, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Herbert Hoover in 1932. The other members of this bitter club of one-and-doners are John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce, Benjamin Harrison and William Howard Taft. (Gillian Brockell) In Pennsylvania, small shifts in small places added up to a big difference for Biden.“It wasn’t Pennsylvania’s major urban centers that set the result in 2020 — a narrow Biden win — apart from the outcome in 2016, when the state delivered perhaps the cruelest cut of all to Democratic dreams. It was Erie County and other places like it, where relatively minor shifts across a wide swath of small, industrial cities, growing suburbs and sprawling exurbs added up, and made all the difference,” Griff Witte reports. “Those margins were tight in 2016: Trump won Erie — population 270,000, hard on the lake of the same name — by two points, contributing to his statewide victory by 0.7 percent. The margins were tighter still on Saturday: Biden was ahead by 1.1 percentage points in Erie, with 99 percent of votes counted, and half a percentage point statewide. … "Unlike other elections that have shifted control in the White House — most recently in 2008 and 2016 — 2020 was not accompanied by any fundamental realignment of the American electorate. If anything, the result reinforced many of the elements that defined Trump’s victory four years ago, especially the stark divide between rural and urban America. … ‘You have a fast-diversifying younger population. And you still have a large, older, White population,’ said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ‘That’s where we’re going to be for a while.’” Arizona’s political transformation began long before Biden was on the ballot.“Preliminary exit polls show that Trump and Biden roughly tied among White voters, who made up about three-quarters of the electorate statewide. But Biden won 2 out of every 3 Hispanic voters in the state and enjoyed particularly strong support among Latinas, 7 out of 10 of whom backed Biden,” Jose Del Real and Hannah Knowles report. “By party registration, the exit polls showed Biden also had a sizable lead among independent voters, a shift for Democrats since the 2016 campaign. … Many who cast a ballot for Biden in Arizona said they were voting more against the president than for Biden, which tracks with polling done in the state. Biden’s strength with Latino voters in Arizona stands in contrast to results in Florida and Texas." Many independents in Arizona also recoiled in recent years at Trump’s attacks on John McCain, who represented the state in the Senate, and whose widow, Cindy, endorsed Biden. | ||
The voting wars continueTrump supporters insisted the election isn’t over, as they continued to protest.“From [Phoenix] to Philadelphia, Trump backers echoed the president’s attacks on the integrity of the election, which continued Saturday with his statement that ‘this election is far from over.’ They made baseless allegations of voter fraud and pledged to keep fighting in court while claiming Biden did not legitimately win,” Hannah Knowles, Mark Berman and Nick Miroff report. “They gathered at so-called ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies at state capitols across the country to claim, without evidence, that ballot counts favorable to Biden stem from a sprawling, multistate conspiracy to hijack the vote through fraud. It is unclear how widespread such views are beyond these events and high-profile conservative figures, and some GOP figures have pushed back on claims of a rigged election. … More than 300 people gathered in Salem, Ore., outside the state capitol to wave Trump flags and decry the outcome of the election. Among them were members of the far-right Proud Boys and numerous people affiliated with self-styled militia groups who were armed with assault-style rifles.” A president obsessed with winning spent the day refusing to admit defeat.“Trump had just arrived at his namesake golf course in Sterling, Va., on Saturday morning — whizzing past signs blaring ‘Biden/Harris’ and ‘Good Riddance’ — when Biden pulled so far ahead in the Pennsylvania vote count that he was finally declared the next president … The president remained cosseted away at Trump National Golf Club for three more hours, finishing his morning on the links with Kevin Morris, the club’s manager, in one of the few situations he could still control to his own liking,” Parker and Dawsey report. “Back in Trumpworld, the efforts at counterprogramming had a characteristically slapdash feel. Before Biden was declared the winner, the Trump campaign had scheduled a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia with the president’s lawyers, but when Trump initially tweeted it out, he incorrectly implied it was at the Four Seasons Hotel. The hotel’s Philadelphia location quickly offered its own clarification, tweeting: ‘To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping — no relation with the hotel.’ Trump’s lawyers did ultimately show up at the right spot, speaking against a makeshift backdrop of blue and red Trump signs at the landscaping business, in view of a crematorium and an adult entertainment shop … [Rudy] Giuliani yelled at the news conference that all the networks calling the race could be wrong. … |
Twitter flagged Trump’s latest round of false claims about election fraud on Saturday night as "disputed." “The tech giant, however, took minimal action to limit Trump’s millions of followers from viewing it or re-sharing it widely,” Tony Romm reports. | |||||||||||||||
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