Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics,
President Biden and President-elect Trump sat side-by-side in the Oval Office after the election exchanging pleasantries in front of the cameras, both promising “a smooth transition.”
Biden vowed to “do everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated,” insisting the president-elect would get “what you need.” Trump replied, “I very much appreciate that,” agreeing with the president that the coming transfer of power would be “as smooth as it can get.”
That era of good feeling, if it hadn’t already, ended two weeks from inauguration day. “They say we’re going to have a smooth transition,” Trump said Tuesday during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, “all they do is talk. It’s all talk.” The incoming president feels sabotaged by the outgoing president on at least two fronts: A sudden and sweeping offshore drilling ban and his imminent sentencing in his New York hush money trial.
Biden announced earlier this week that he would protect 625 million acres of ocean from offshore oil and gas drilling along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. An environmentalist, he has conserved more land and waters than any other president in history and condemned the “false choice” of choosing “between protecting the environment and growing our economy” when announcing the ban under a provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
Predictably, Trump balked. “It is like the whole ocean,” he said while reflecting on the vast acreage and complaining that his predecessor had just “destroyed the economic viability of drilling in the ocean.”
“I’m going to have it revoked on day one,” he continued before indicating that such a move would likely incur legal challenges. And he should know. Trump tried to reverse former President Barack Obama’s ban on drilling in Arctic and Atlantic waters through executive action, only to be blocked by a federal court in 2019. The judge ruled that reversing a ban would require congressional action.
Democratic administrations tend to be more conservation-minded, while Republican ones are more permissive of oil and gas production. This is nothing. During the campaign, Trump often bragged about how the United States became a net exporter of fossil fuels during his tenure, boasting about the vast reserves of “liquid gold under our feet,” a supply far greater “than any other country.” And while the U.S., in fact, hit record highs of domestic oil production in the last four years, Biden hastened and cheered the transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy.
The latest conservation effort is more than just energy policy in the eyes of Trump. It is instead a direct attempt to hamstring his strategy to bring down inflation before that plan can even start. During remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump vowed that increased drilling would bring down gas prices and reduce manufacturing inputs, thus “driving down inflation.” At Mar-a-Lago, an optimistic president-elect pegged the value of offshore drilling at $50 trillion, complaining that Biden “has thrown it away.”
Of course, there is no love lost between Trump and Biden. The Republican calls his counterpart “the worst president in history.” The Democrat regularly called his predecessor “a threat to democracy.”
“Decades ago, this sort of petty behavior was limited to the Clinton team taking the ‘W’ off the keyboard before Bush took office. Now we have this sort of crap,” Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff, told RealClearPolitics. He also pointed to federal employees at the EPA racing to lock in union contracts ahead of a second Trump term as more evidence of a permissive outgoing president stymieing his successor. “It’s outrageous and will likely lead to a bipartisan effort to dramatically curtail presidential authority,” Mulvaney added, “especially during lame duck periods.”
While Biden sees last-minute conservation as part of legacy building, Mulvaney and other Republicans see it as an ongoing failure of Democrats to understand the electorate.
“What I can’t understand is this: If this is about your legacy, why make your legacy something that American voters just soundly rejected?” added the former chief. “If they thought banning offshore drilling was a good idea, they could’ve voted for Kamala.”
Regardless of partisanship, there was a brief reprise. Susie Wiles, the incoming chief of staff, praised Jeff Zients as “very professional,” telling Axios in a recent interview that Biden’s chief of staff has not only been “very helpful” during the transition but even made “great suggestions, helped make sure we stay on time with required functions, helped us navigate the labyrinth that is the Executive Office.” Zients also recently hosted Wiles at his home.
That kind of generosity has done nothing to soothe the anger of Trump, who was bristling during his news conference at his upcoming criminal sentencing in New York related to a hush-money payment to a porn star during his first presidential campaign. He makes little distinction between state and federal cases, and he seemed to accuse the Biden administration of “playing with the courts.”
A prison sentence is off the table in that case in light of Trump’s electoral victory, but that has not stemmed his anger at New York prosecutors or special counsel Jack Smith, who was temporarily blocked by a federal court from releasing his final report on his investigation into the former president.
While the White House has long insisted that they played no part in any of those legal proceedings, the Washington Post has reported that, in private, Biden has said he regrets picking Merrick Garland to be his attorney general. The reason: the tardiness of the Department of Justice in prosecuting Trump ahead of an election.
That contest is now over. The last remaining prize after an electoral rebuke: the moral high ground. Democrats feel confident they have it, given the way they have handled the peaceful transition of power. “Monday was the four-year anniversary of the only time a sitting president tried to overthrow the American government because they didn’t have the guts to accept that they lost,” a former Biden-Harris transition official replied when asked about Trump’s smooth transition comments before telling RCP that “peaceful transfers are not his style.”
Vice President Harris presided over the count of electoral college votes Tuesday and certified his victory over her. There were no objections. It was the first time that a Republican presidential candidate’s victory was certified without objections from House Democrats since 1988.
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