Op-Ed: If Joe Biden wins, which President Trump will we get in his last three months in office? A spiteful or defeated one?
The election is just days away. And, it’s safe to say we are approaching every poll and piece of data with caution after one of the biggest upsets in 2016, even though many of them have made the appropriate adjustments based off the last presidential election data. Currently, abc news’ FIveThirtyEight has Joe Biden with an 89% chance of winning to President Trump’s 10% give or take. There is a 1% chance of a tie. Still, anything can happen. But in the chance that the election falls in that 89% for a Joe Biden victory, how will the United States look in the last three months of Trump’s term? And what kind of president will Donald Trump be?
Perhaps one of two. Spiteful or defeated. It has been unpredictable for many years but his unpredictability has become unpredictable. It is certain that there will be some tweets and possibly even a serious push in the courts to contest the election because hey, who doesn’t hate losing? There also will most likely be some terrible name calling, a blame game, and finger pointing to pin the loss. But after all that is said and done, Trump still has three months left as a president.
With a Democratic controlled house and Republican controlled senate, not much will get done in terms of going through congress. Plus, holiday breaks always seem to stall any kind of progress anyway. Both Presidents Obama and Bush had the opposite party controlling the senate or house in their last few months as well. So, like every other president before them, they turned to the executive order.
President Obama issued 18 of his 276 executive orders from election day 2016 to Inauguration Day in January 2017. President Bush issued 11 of his 291 executive orders in his last months in office from 2008 and 2009. As it stands, Trump has issued 193 in just one term. Both Obama and Bush were two term presidents. So when it comes to executive orders, he’s ahead of the game. Although many of them take years to go into effect and some have been repealed or withdrawn. And to be fair, one of those executive orders was addressing the “threat of TikTok.”
So, in the last few months of a Trump presidency, we may see a lot of executive orders on topics ranging from Covid relief to refugees to healthcare. Maybe even bailing out the airlines. We will absolutely see some pardons. But if a guess was to be made about what a spiteful Trump may do, it’s that he will go after his white whale, Obamacare. President Trump has done nothing but attack it since it passed in 2010. This is a man that holds grudges. And, given the state of the Supreme Court, he has a fighting chance. His two most recent appointees, Kavanaugh and Barrett, are a threat to the Affordable Care Act according to many Democrats. They would tip the scales in favor of repealing it. But that will only happen if that’s who Trump wants to be. It will only happen if he gets enough fuel to drive that belief. Pushes from his inner circle or senators like McConnell and Graham. If a last ditch effort by Trump to bring the election to the courts fail, Trump will swing a sword at his obsession with Obama one last time.
However, there have been times when it seems like Trump has conceded to whatever the issue may be. And, Trump conceding on an issue is equal to him doubling down on a mistake. For example, Covid-19. He knew how deadly this virus could be back in March and continued to play it down. He knew his strongest asset for re-election was the economy and stock market. Both will fail if the country is shut down. So when the the stock market crashed and the Covid numbers began to rise, he doubled down on not implementing a mask mandate or shutting down to save lives. And, the United States is seeing the repercussions.
With a Joe Biden win, Trump may just slowly give up and accept defeat. It’s very weird to say that but all the previous evidence of who Trump is points in that direction. Trump seems to be a “what’s in it for me?” man. If he isn’t going to be president, then what’s the value of being president? He will double down on the conspiracy theories about the Bidens. He will continue to tweet about how the election was rigged. Enough for Fox news to latch on to its hero’s last remaining leg. He will complain and continue to gaslight Americans into believing they’ve made a terrible mistake. He will double down on blaming Obama for failures in his administration. And, he will stop on January 20, 2021, Inauguration Day, because these are not his problems anymore. They are Joe Biden’s. Also, because many of us will stop paying attention to him.
Who knows what Joe Biden’s presidency will look like? It’s always hard to tell. But I think many of us can logically say that we will see a kind of Trump we’ve seen in the past while we wait for Inauguration Day. One that is spiteful. Or, one that is defeated. Or maybe, in his last three months he becomes a president that unites the world for the better! But there are no polls on his human behavior that so it’s pretty much wishful thinking. Whatever happens, I hope this country continues to grow for the better.
