Trump's lame-duck team lurches to a bitter and pointless finish
A view from outside the White House grounds on Tuesday. Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik
Drawing the final breaths of elected power, the Trump administration's top personnel seem to be taking little authentic action, other than dealing with the fictions, whims and vanity of their defeated boss. A lack of public purpose has been clear from the start, but now the randomness and futility of the whole troubled enterprise come into full view.
It ends pretty much as it began.
For Attorney General William Barr, predecessor Jeff Sessions may represent a ghost of Christmas past. President Donald Trump heckled and humiliated Sessions, his first attorney general, for failing to crush the Russiagate investigation.
In contrast, Barr may have strung Trump along into believing he'd carry out fierce inquisitions against the leadership of the Democratic Party. But like Sessions, who recused himself from what became the Mueller probe, Barr never delivered the desired goods — probably because there were no goods to deliver.
Rudy Giuliani failed in less subtle ways. Still a sycophant, the former New York City mayor helped gin up Trump's fantasies that President-elect Joe Biden lost the election. Giuliani's efforts to overturn a democratic election with false assertions of fraud proved almost as ridiculous as his earlier efforts to destroy Biden with mystery laptops and Kremlin-friendly affidavits.
Trump has never seemed focused on governance.
His inaction and deflections during the coronavirus pandemic provided only the most disastrous example. He played no constructive role in crafting or negotiating a COVID-19 relief bill that he now carps about after the fact.
So it stands to reason that seven weeks after Election Day, Trump has remained mostly behind closed doors. He had no public events on his schedule Tuesday, and none since Friday, actually. Word of unlikely schemes, plots, tensions and chaos provide the only news out of the Oval Office, other than a raft of selected holiday pardons for convicted allies.
Four years ago, Trump picked as national security adviser his rally-booster Michael Flynn, a longtime loose cannon and promoter of conspiracy stories who lobbied for Turkish interests during the 2016 campaign. Now, after his presidential pardon for perjury charges, Flynn's crazy talk on Trump's behalf draws renewed attention.
Trump "could immediately on his order seize every single one of these machines around the country on his order," Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, told Newsmax last week. "He could also order, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states."
This is most likely part of a last blast of nongovernmental noise from the Trump crew.
Loyal-to-a-fault Vice President Mike Pence — who for all we know, he may have proved more competent than Trump in the top job — has become an object of the unhappy lame-duck president's irritation, according to Axios. Trump recently cited in private discussions an ad by the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump PAC, that said Pence was "backing away" from him, the news site reported.
All the way through to the end, Trump and his diplomats, headed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, remain on different public pages regarding cyberthreats from Russia. Trump downplays and denies the problem, as he always has.
If his concern was for the U.S. and not for himself, Trump might have explained long ago why he always takes such a blithe tack in the face of American intelligence information. At any rate, the die is now cast, and Biden — whose victory Trump still cannot bring himself to face — soon gets to deal with the problem.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
