America’s three-month vacuum

Tobias Stone
3 min readNov 8, 2020
Photo by Jason Hafso on Unsplash

Whilst Trump spends 3 months raging and fighting, who will run the country?

Back in the day, when America was still ‘normal,’ the 3 months between a president winning and taking office was a period when the incubment raced to see through policy objectives, and the newcomer formed a team to take over.

This time around will be different. Biden has already governed, and has an experienced team that was only disbanded a few years ago. Trump has mainly not governed, hollowing out the country’s political structures. Biden can fill the gap and begin to run the country competently from January 20th, but Trump’s deafening silence these last few days suggests he will spend the next few months focussed on legal battles, misinformation, and most likely doing all he can to save himself and his family. He’s more likely to leave prawns sewn into the curtains of the Oval Office than a carefully crafted letter in the drawer of the desk.

When autocrats fall, all but the most crazed loyalists abandon them quickly and absolutely. Leaders who rule through patronage earn no loyalty or love, they hold power only by being useful to others — a source of food for parasites. When they cease to be useful they are nothing more than a husk. Trump gave power to his allies, wealth to his friends and family, and attention to his media supporters. The Social Media companies sat and fiddled whilst Trump burned democracy through their platforms because he generated huge amounts of attention, and for them attention is money.

It is interesting how quickly Twitter started to black out Trump’s Tweets once it looked like he had both lost the election, and lost the plot. Once he was no longer in a position to be a genuine threat to them, he was all but silenced: from a source of revenue to a source of embarasement in just a short few days.

All Trump has left now, in reality and as a fitting metaphore, is Rudy ranting in a car park, and a few loyal golf cadies. The foreign leaders who fawned over him have abandoned him, with Bolsonaro claiming that Trump, is ‘not the most important person in the world,' and Netanyahu reminding Biden of their long-standing friendship.

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