The Trumpers think they’re a joke and that Biden has been a joke for adhering to them:
Donald Trump and his incoming administration officials think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suckers. They’re not shy about saying it.
Within the past month, Biden, Harris, and the current administration have repeatedly vowed an orderly, peaceful, fully cooperative transfer of power between Biden and Trump — a twice-impeached former president and convicted felon whom the president, vice president, and Democratic leaders regularly denounced as a “fascist” tyrant and clear threat to the constitutional order.
It hasn’t just been the legal transfer and procedures to which Democrats have committed themselves. Biden has promised to attend Trump’s 2025 inauguration, even though Trump refused to grant him the same grace after the 2020 election. Of course, then-President Trump actively sought to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory and even helped foment a violent coup at the U.S. Capitol as part of his monthslong effort to cling to power.
Not long after the election this early November, Biden hosted Trump at the White House for a pleasant photo opportunity. The president and vice president congratulated Trump, and Biden told him “welcome back” to his face, as the two men sat down for the news cameras, as if they were old pals who had just resolved a mildly heated argument.
These actions are all far, far above and beyond what Trump and his first administration were willing to do during the last U.S. presidential transition for Biden — including in its commitment to basic decorum and photo ops that don’t even technically affect the legal transfer of power.
And — in the same way that top Trump adviser Stephen Miller privately found it funny that Biden actually preserved some of his and Trump’s preferred immigration crackdown methods — members of Team Trump find this asymmetrical level of commitment to norms, well, funny.
“Some of us have been laughing about it,” an incoming Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone.
It doesn’t matter if they are laughing. They’re just assholes, we know that. But it does say something about our current situation. The idea that norms can be upheld by Democrats alone is sophistry. Norms by definition cannot be norms if they are only upheld by one party.
I think Biden should have agreed to the the transition, as he did, but refused to meet and hold a photo op. And while he should go to the inauguration to show there is a peaceful transfer of power, plenty of other Democrats including dignitaries like Obama and Clinton should decline. Norms for thee but not for me just doesn’t work. (And yes, as I wrote earlier, Biden was right to pardon Hunter under the circumstances. Political pardons have been done by most presidents and there is no reason for Biden to sacrifice his son on the alter of “norms” that don’t apply to anyone but Democrats. Fie on that.)