Trump fired the Secretary of Defense on Monday: Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, called Mr. Esper five minutes before the president’s Twitter post to tell him he had been fired. Mr. Esper was still at the Pentagon cleaning out his desk on Monday afternoon when Mr. Miller arrived, administration officials said.
Trump official Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, has refused to issue a letter of “ascertainment,” which allows Mr. Biden’s transition team to begin the transfer of power. An official “said it would be strange for President Trump to send some kind of a signal to allow the transition to start while he is still engaged in court fights.”
Habberman writes in the Friday New York Times: “He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future.
There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.
Also in the New York Times: “The first small cracks have begun to appear in the Republican wall of support for President Trump and his unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, with a growing number of elected officials and party leaders signaling on Thursday that they would indulge Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories for only so long. A few were willing to openly contradict him.” These include the Governor of Ohio, Carl Rove, Grassley, and John Bolton.
Edsal: Many of those I questioned see this discrepancy as stemming from Trump’s individual personality and characterological deficiencies — what they call his narcissism and his sociopathy. Others offer a more starkly political interpretation: that the refusal to accept Biden’s victory stems from the frustration of a Republican Party struggling to remain competitive in the face of an increasingly multicultural electorate. In the end, it appears to be a mixture of both.
Legal Challenges
Leading Republicans rallied on Monday around President Trump’s refusal to concede the election, declining to challenge the false narrative that it was stolen from him or to recognize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
President Trump suffered multiple legal setbacks in three key swing states on Friday, choking off many of his last-ditch efforts to use the courts to delay or block President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 44.8%
COVID Cases / Deaths: 10,690,665 / 243,580