Like everyone else capable of rational thought, I find the Trump administration’s refusal to allow the Biden team access to the government departments and agencies and the information they will need to make a smooth transition into a new administration (not to mention funding and office space) alarming. But it’s not just Trump being a sore loser and lost in his alternate reality; it has to do with his whole attitude towards the government. Trump didn’t think a transition necessary when he was the president elect — why should he think it necessary for anyone else?
In 2016, the Obama administration was prepared for detailed briefings in all departments to pass on information about what the department or agency did, how it worked, etc. after Trump’s win. And Chris Christie, before the win in charge of transition planning, had assembled resumes and preliminary vetting of possible appointees to many positions in the government and a plan for receiving the briefings prepared. Whatever one thinks of Christie, he understood what administering a government entails.
When he presented this to Trump and the inner circle, his plan was dumped in the trash (literally) and Steve Bannon fired him. And those department and agency employees who were waiting to give briefings to the incoming administration? They kept waiting. There was no interest from Trump’s inner circle.
Late in the 2016 campaign I suddenly realized I wasn’t looking at a presidential campaign, I was looking at a hostile takeover, and that’s what it became. He didn’t care about how it worked. He was only interested in how he could get the maximum profit from it by selling parts of it off, by strangling many of its functions, by dismantling what he could not sell. As with every other business he had ever taken over, the plan was to run it into the ground and make sure he ended up with money no matter who else (including the American people) got screwed. Do you remember that one of Jared Kushner’s early jobs was to come up with a plan to reorganize the whole thing to streamline it and get rid of whatever he deemed unnecessary? Heaven only knows what Biden’s team will find when they actually do get to look at what’s left.
If you haven’t read Michael Lewis’ book The Fifth Risk, I highly recommend it. It shows what this actually looked like from the inside after two years. And we’ve seen some of the results in the administration’s total inability to deal with this pandemic, and so much else.
And it gives some insight into what we are seeing now that Trump has to come to terms with losing the presidency and passing the government on to the next administration.