President-elect Donald Trump will not officially take power until January. Unofficially, Washington is already beginning its realignment.
This week, the city took two major steps in that direction. Wednesday saw the announcement from FBI Director Christopher Wray that he will not continue his term in office under the incoming Trump administration; he will resign in January.
The move plays up the urgency for the Senate to make a decision on Kash Patel, Trump’s controversial pick for the agency. It’s also good news for Trump in general, who would inevitably have fired Wray — and faced an unfriendly news cycle because of it — if he hadn’t made the decision to step aside. (The FBI director’s term officially ends in 2027, but Trump’s growing dislike of him made it clear he wouldn’t have allowed that term to play out once he re-entered the Oval Office.)
In the Senate, a familiar pair of lawmakers dealt the Biden administration and the incumbent president’s party one final defeat on the same day.
Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin — the centrist independents who remain in the Democratic caucus despite elevation to near-cartoonish heights of villainry among the Democratic Party’s base — struck a blow against fellow lame-ducker Joe Biden and refused to confirm the reappointment of NLRB chief Lauren McFerran. Tanking that reappointment frees up the position to immediately be filled by Trump when he arrives in January.
It was one final act of resistance for a duo who stymied much of Biden’s agenda by refusing to back carve-outs of the filibuster to pass a voting rights bill or legislation that would have codified Roe v Wade into law, not to mention the president’s signature Build Back Better package. And it was one that made something abundantly clear: Joe Biden’s lame duck period will be very lame indeed.
So what is the sitting president doing? Thursday morning brought news that Biden had issued another wave of commutations, after facing pressure from criminal justice reform groups and progressives in his party to do so. The response was muted, given that the move itself was fairly muted: commutations announced only included Americans who’d already been moved to home confinement. They failed to address calls from the ACLU and a number of prominent figures including Richard Branson for the president to take much more meaningful action and commute the federal death row, thereby averting a spree of executions the likes of which the first Trump administration undertook in 2020.
Washington appears to be moving on from Biden at a quickened pace, possibly accelerated by the president’s own voluntary bowing-out from the spotlight in July. Kamala Harris has been virtually invisible since her defeat, echoing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 disappearance into the woods of Chappaqua — only this time, it’s the sitting vice president.
Leaders around the world, meanwhile, are themselves already preparing for a Trumpworld takeover of Washington DC.
The president-elect is actively taking meetings with dignitaries including Canada’s Justin Trudeau, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Prince William — these just in the last handful of days. He has also spoken with Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum on the phone and reportedly reached out to China’s Xi Jinping with an invitation to attend his inauguration, according to CBS News. Chinese officials told CBS that he won’t attend.
If Biden is going to do anything to define the last weeks of his presidency, and to cement his overall legacy, it will now have to be through Executive Branch action. Whether there’s actually any energy left to do something like that truly invites speculation.
