Beware the perils of a presidential transition

It’s a fragile period as – for the best part of three months – the US effectively has two executives, writes Mary Dejevsky

The occupant of the White House will change on 20 January (Reuters)

The latest news from the two sides of the Atlantic has offered a counterpoint to savour. 

From the US came the announcement that the president-elect, Joe Biden, had appointed Ron Klain, an aide with a wealth of administrative experience, as his chief of staff, and there was a formal printed letter to prove it. 

In the UK meanwhile, Lee Cain, the prime minister Boris Johnson’s head of communications, resigned after his proposed promotion to chief of staff had apparently caused a major ruckus behind that famous No 10 door.  

The paradox is that Biden, despite now having a title, a security detail, and published lists of his transition team’s names, has as yet no executive power. Johnson, in contrast, has a parliamentary majority that enables him to push through pretty much any policy he likes, even as his own administration, mired in the double pandemic-Brexit crisis, seems to be all at sea.  

While the striking orderliness of the Biden transition arrangements, however, is entirely to be expected of someone with so much Washington experience, who has waited so long for the top job, it also belies the reality in another way. For all the appearance of stability, a presidential handover that entails a change not just of the individual, but of political direction, can be fraught with risk.

This is true even when the transition is, at least on the surface, entirely smooth, even amicable – as when George Bush the elder welcomed the Clintons to the White House, and when his son did the same for the Obamas. It is more tense when the contrast in character and policies is as stark as it appears to be between Biden and Trump, and as it was when Bill Clinton had to hand over not, as he had expected, to his vice president, Al Gore, but to his opponent, George Bush, after the “tied election” of 2000. 

When the defeated incumbent defies convention by refusing to concede – as Trump has done, though for how much longer? – the transition starts to look potentially destabilising.

Part of the fault lies with the constitutional arrangements in the United States. When the opposition wins a general election in the UK, the new prime minister enters No 10 as soon as he or she has made the ritual visit to Buckingham Palace, with the removal vans for the outgoing head of government sometimes being loaded outside the back door. Within less than 24 hours of a clear election result, power has changed.

The UK is unusual in the speed of its handovers. This is not how it happens in most of the world – and for good reason. An instant handover risks lacking order and dignity, and – for all the efforts of the apolitical civil service – the incoming prime minister can be entirely unprepared. The day after seems to me to be too short.

But the United States transition, under normal circumstances, lasts more than two and a half months. Presidential elections happen in the first week of November, with the new president inaugurated on 20 January the following year. This is partly to allow for the formal election of the new president by the electoral college – the point Donald Trump is arguably waiting for before accepting defeat – and partly because many more jobs go to political appointees in the US than in many other democratic countries, so there has to be time for these appointments to be made.

It has also to be said that the length of the transition also came in handy in 2000, when the outcome went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The ruling, which was handed down on 12 December, left the incoming administration scrambling to make its appointments and it took office with big gaps still remaining in its staff. That is how long these things take in the US system.  

What makes this period so perilous, however, almost regardless of the policy differences between the incoming and outgoing administrations, is that for the best part of three months, the US effectively has two executives. To be sure, there is a rather high-minded convention according to which an outgoing president does nothing controversial during the transition, and nothing that would tie the hands of the successor. There is also a rather high-minded view among observers that this is what actually happens – which is not quite true.

When a challenger wins an election some power passes instantly to the victor, regardless of any transition. It is not for nothing that a warning reportedly went out to White House staff last week not to leave their posts – many will be preparing to do just that. Foreign governments are already looking to the new administration, as seen in the unseemly race to be first to speak to the president-elect on the phone.

Biden and his staff may have eschewed meetings with international representatives during the campaign – so as to avoid the accusations levelled against Trump’s staff-in-waiting four years ago for meeting, among others, the Russian ambassador. But now those constraints are off. Biden, his vice president, Kamala Harris, and aides of his likely choices for major posts are the people in Washington to meet. Given the scale of his preparations and the likelihood, given his age (78 at the end of this month), that he will be a one-term president, Biden can be expected to hit the ground running.

At the same time, Trump is constitutionally correct when he behaves as though he still wields power. Indeed, he retains his executive authority until the new president has been sworn in on Inauguration Day. And he can use it, not only to issue pardons – as most outgoing presidents have done – but to try to cement what he might see as his achievements and limit the policy reversals Biden can enact.

A detailed blueprint for Biden’s foreign policy is already doing the rounds. And some of his proposed changes – such as the return of the US to the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organisation (WHO), as well as a more supportive attitude to the European members of Nato – will be entirely his to implement from the start of day one. Others, though, could be complicated by actions that the outgoing president might take.

In recent days, Trump has sacked his whole top defence line-up, sparking alarmism in some quarters about military adventures – though this is unlikely, given that he has so far honoured his four-year-old campaign pledge not to embroil the US in more foreign wars. An outside possibility might be an eleventh-hour US-Russia summit.

More plausible is that Trump wants to speed up the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan to pre-empt any policy change by his successor. How far such a swift exit is practicable is the subject of impassioned debate on the social media – and presumably also in the corridors of power. But it illustrates the sort of questions currently in play, and how far a presidential transition leaves the country betwixt and between.

Trump has only to look back at what happened to the Wye River accords between Israel and the Palestinians mediated by President Clinton shortly before the 2000 election. An agreement that Clinton hoped would become part of his legacy went essentially unobserved by either side, once it was clear Gore had lost the election.

A US presidential transition can be a fragile period, when there is both an overlapping of two presidencies and an effective vacuum of power. For the weeks that the transition lasts, US power in the world is uniquely circumscribed and the US itself is vulnerable to adversaries tempted to probe. This is true even when all the conventions are observed. 

The more reluctant the handover and the sharper the policy differences, the more perils those weeks portend. They could hardly be more perilous than they are now.