As Trump Digs In on Concession, a 'Forceful Rebuke'

While President Trump continues to refuse to concede the election, Joe Biden is forging ahead as the president-elect. "It’s an embarrassment, quite frankly," Biden told reporters Tuesday of Trump's refusal to concede. "How can I say this tactfully? I think it will not help the president's legacy." He also noted he expects Republicans to eventually come around and reach across the aisle to work with him. "I think they understand we have to come together," he said, per the Washington Post. "I think they're ready to unite." Other Dems aren't quite as confident, either on Trump's eventual moves or on the GOPers who are standing behind him. "I don't think many of us expected President Trump to leave office of the presidency with grace," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday. "But the extent to which the Republican Party is legitimizing the president's assault on our democracy is infuriating and deeply, deeply wrong." More:

• Trump and some allies are plowing ahead as if he's staying in the White House, blocking Biden's transition team from resources they need, making references to "a smooth transition to a second Trump administration," and now, instructing federal agencies to keep putting together a budget proposal for the 2022 fiscal year, sources tell the Washington Post. "They're pretending nothing happened,” an administration official involved in the planning of the budget says. "We're all supposed to pretend this is normal, and do all this work, while we know we're just going to have to throw it away."

• As news emerges of at least one fraud allegation that's been debunked, the New York Times went a step further, calling election officials from both parties in all 50 states to see what's up. The verdict: "no evidence of voter fraud," a find the NYT calls a "forceful rebuke" to Trump's claims. The paper explains that while there were scattered irregularities that normally pop up in most elections, there's nothing that's been seriously amiss or that would significantly affect the vote counts.
• Politico further details the Biden team's strategy in dealing with Trump's ploys, which involves not taking the bait on many of the president's remarks, continuing to exude confidence to the American people that it's a done deal, and "largely behaving as though it's business as usual": Biden has so far had calls with multiple world leaders and made public statements on COVID-19 and the ACA, for example. "We don't see anything that's slowing us down, quite frankly," Biden said Tuesday.
• However, some in Biden's sphere think he should be calling even more attention to Trump's attempts to block a smooth transition. "We want this to be a very public issue," David Shulkin, who served as Trump's VA secretary and also in the Obama administration as VA undersecretary. "We want ... President-elect Biden to talk about why this transition process is so important and to make sure that this does not go off track with the pandemic facing all of us."
• Whether he's in real denial about the results of the election or it's a purposeful strategy to cause chaos and sow doubt, Trump's messaging continues to be that he's not going anywhere. Now, however, a new question has emerged on his refusal to concede: "Who's going to tell him?" asks the New York Times, which says neither staunch Trump loyalists nor Republicans who've worked with him reluctantly in a transactional sense seem "particularly well suited" for the task of confronting the president on the reality of the situation.

(More Election 2020 stories.)