‘He’s psychologically incapable of processing this loss’: Mary Trump and government insiders worry about Trump’s ‘smash and grab’ on his way out of office

More than 72 hours after statisticians examining election returns independently reported that there is no mathematical pathway by which he could retain the presidency, Donald Trump remains in denial. The president appears to have largely abandoned his day-to-day responsibilities, while at the same time deploying governmental authority to prevent Biden from preparing to assume office.

The 45th president has not had an intelligence briefing on his public schedule since 1 October 1; has not attended a meeting of the White House Coronavirus Task Force in months; and aides say he has spent the days since he lost the election vacillating between despondency and rage. 

Today, Trump emerged from five days of isolation within the White House complex – an extraordinary amount of time spent largely incommunicado for a man who constantly demands attention from the press and public – to mark the Veterans Day holiday with a wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery.

Meanwhile, the man who will become the nation’s 46th president – President-elect Joe Biden – plans to spend Veterans Day huddled with transition advisers who are helping him formulate a plan for when he assumes responsibility for the entire executive branch at 12.01 pm on January 20, 2021. In the days since it became clear that voters had chosen him over Trump, Biden has spoken with heads of government from France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and Canada, and has received congratulatory messages from many more.

“The Biden-Harris transition is moving forward with preparations so that President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are ready to lead our country on Day One and meet the pressing challenges facing our nation,” said a Biden-Harris transition spokesperson.

Yet even as the world has accepted Biden’s ascent to the nation’s highest office as a fait accompli, Trump and his allies remain firmly in denial. And because Trump still controls the executive branch, he is using that power to deny Biden the official recognition he needs to begin the formal transition process.

That recognition ordinarily comes from the Administrator of the General Services Administration, a little-known federal agency which runs government buildings and handles purchasing for most of the government. According to a memorandum of understanding between the Biden campaign and the agency, the administrator – a Trump appointee named Emily Murphy – is responsible for “ascertaining” the “apparent winner” of the 2020 election. This is usually a formality which unlocks millions of federal funds and other resources available to the president-elect and his advisers.

Usually, such paperwork is quickly signed within 24 hours of the presidential race being called for one candidate or another. This year, however, GSA press secretary Pamela Pennington said in an email that the agency would only move to unlock transition funds and other resources “once a winner is clear based on the process laid out in the Constitution”. The only “process laid out in the Constitution”, however, takes place when the Electoral College presents its votes on 14 December.

A source familiar with internal deliberations at GSA has said the impetus for its reluctance to recognise Biden as the winner before the Electoral College officially votes (which has never happened before) is almost entirely due to pressure from the White House. Attorney Trent Benishek transferred from the White House Counsel’s Office and was named as GSA’s general counsel just four days before the election. He did not respond to request for comment.

The Biden-Harris team’s view, according to a spokesperson, is that Murphy should “move quickly to ascertain the results and send a clear signal that she will respect the will of the American people and engage in a smooth and peaceful transfer of power” now that “the outcome of the election is clear”. For his part, Biden called Trump’s intransigence and refusal to concede “an embarrassment” during a brief question-and-answer session with reporters on Tuesday, even as he stressed that his transition effort has lots of work it can do without access to the post-election resources it would normally be entitled to. Access to classified information such as the president’s daily briefing would be useful, Biden said, but is not necessary at this time.

But sources familiar with transitions past and present – as well as those familiar with the behaviour of the president, as well as that of authoritarian leaders across the world – are concerned. Specifically, they worry that Trump administration delays could both hinder a Biden administration’s ability to keep the country safe and serve as a launch-point for continued attempts by Trump to destabilise any US government that does not feature him at the top of it.

“We are facing multiple crises as a country right now, and we can’t afford to waste any time,” said an official working on the transition. “The election results are clear, every major news outlet has called [elections] for the past 60 years since Congress passed the Presidential Transition Act, and the GSA administrator has usually recognised the winner within 24 hours.”

The transition official said any further delay could have “serious implications for national security and economic security”, citing the national commission formed to investigate the 11 September, 2001 terrorist attacks. In its report, the commission found that delays in the transition process due to the 2000 Florida recount hindered the incoming Bush administration’s national security efforts and played a role in letting the 9/11 attack plans remain under the government’s radar.

University of Virginia Miller Center Senior Fellow Chris Lu, a former Deputy Labor Secretary who served as the executive director of the 2008-2009 Obama-Biden transition effort, said he did not know if it was possible to quantify the damage to national security that could result from a delayed transition process.

“In 78 days, there's not enough time to plan for the takeover of the largest, most powerful organisation in the world. That’s why you start early,” Lu said. “There’s only so much work you can do behind the scenes before election day.”

“All of this matters, and people should be concerned about it,” he added.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor who studies authoritarian regimes, said Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that he has lost the presidency and his push to deny Biden access to the resources he needs to take over “is all very predictable” for someone like him.

“If he can’t have power, no one else can have it either,” she said.

Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, rejects the idea voiced by some Trump critics that he is a “weak authoritarian” who will not have much long-term impact on the strength of US institutions because of his supposed incompetence.

“He’s done a lot of damage – he’s domesticated the Republican Party and major institutions – think about the destruction of the Department of State… All of this running out the clock and trying to incite unrest is him wanting to sabotage the Biden administration from the very start,” she said.

Ben-Ghiat also compared these last days of the Trump administration to the year-long period Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet used following voters’ rejection of his regime to sabotage the incoming government and protect those who’d committed crimes under his direction: “A lot of this is an attempt to leave Biden with the worst conditions possible in terms of Covid, in terms of civil unrest, because this is the vindictiveness of these men, and Trump is exactly like all the other demagogues – he checks every box, and none of them leave power easily.”

Dr Mary Trump, the President’s niece and the author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, said it was “a given” that the president would never accept the results of any election in which he was not declared the winner.

“He’s psychologically incapable of processing this kind of loss,” she said, adding that losing an election is “a unique experience” which her uncle is “constitutionally incapable of dealing with, processing, or moving on from”.

Dr Trump explained that she was hoping for her uncle to lose in the kind of landslide that would have not given him or any other Republicans room to dispute the election results in any meaningful way. The tacit acquiescence of Congressional Republicans could give him cover for yet more malfeasance between now and Inauguration Day, she added.

“Interfering with a peaceful transfer of power is obviously bad, as is undermining the legitimacy of the incoming administration… but who knows what other kind of smash-and-grab activities he’s going to engage in? If it was just him doing those things, it would have been starkly obvious that it was just him doing those things, and they would only serve to humiliate him further and delegitimise him,” she continued. “But it’s not just him, and they are helping him undermine a process that has been in place for over 240 years, and they’re doing it in a way that will have lasting damage no matter what happens.”

But Dr Trump did predict that unhinged behaviour on her uncle’s way out of town will have consequences for him post-presidency – even if he tries to carry on the delusion that he was the true winner of the 2020 race and establish himself as a sort of president-in-exile at Mar-a-Lago: “I think that the longer this charade goes on, the longer he is leading the charge to undermine the United States – which is what he’s doing, we need to be really clear about this – the less likely it is that prosecutors are going to be inclined to back off, because he’s just proving every minute this goes on that he needs to be held accountable.”