Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in CNN’s Meanwhile in America, the email about US politics for global readers.
CNN
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Things could be a little frosty inside the president’s armored limo on the morning of January 20.
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, his predecessor and successor, have never been friendly. The current commander in chief thinks the president-elect is a mortal threat to America’s soul. Trump has long insulted “Sleepy Joe” Biden and claims he ordered his multiple indictments, despite a lack of evidence.
The atmosphere between the two men is worsening by the day as the inauguration nears.
Biden keeps landing jabs seemingly calculated to get under Trump’s skin. And the president-elect has been taking his lumps on social media.
On Wednesday, Biden warned that no one should “jump to conclusions” about the terror attack in New Orleans — hours after Trump had done exactly that by implying on social media that the suspect was a foreign terrorist who recently crossed over the southern border. In fact, he was from Texas and a natural-born US citizen. The president-elect appeared to be basing his claim on an erroneous media report.
On Sunday, Biden was asked what Trump should take away from the life of Jimmy Carter after the 39th president’s passing. “Decency. Decency. Decency,” he replied.
“Can you imagine Jimmy Carter, walking by someone who needs something and just keep walking?” Biden asked. “Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk? I can’t.” In what appeared to be an implicit criticism of Trump’s character and leadership style, Biden said this of Carter: “The rest of the world looks to us … and he was worth looking to.”
On Thursday, in another repudiation of Trump, Biden awarded one of America’s highest civilian honors to Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who split with Trump over his refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election. She was the vice chair of the bipartisan congressional committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, mob attack on Congress. Cheney, who lost her House seat to a Trump-backed primary challenger, got a prolonged standing ovation at the White House when she received the Presidential Citizens Medal for “putting the American people over party.”
Capitol Hill Republicans are threatening to investigate Cheney over her role in probing Trump. And there is speculation that Biden could offer her a preemptive pardon to shield her from criminal prosecution by the incoming Justice Department — even though there is no indication that she broke the law.
Trump, meanwhile, isn’t holding back. Despite Biden’s implicit rebuke, he again sought to blur the truth about the New Orleans truck terror attack in which 14 people were killed. “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”
Trump isn’t wrong to raise the possibility that terrorists could infiltrate the US over the southern border. Biden’s own Homeland Security Department warned of this exact scenario earlier this year. But the president-elect is also misleadingly implying that the attack on New Orleans is such an example. In fact, it’s a sign of something that worries the FBI even more — an attack carried out by an American citizen who appears to have been inspired by ISIS to carry out carnage of his own volition.
Biden and Trump officials say the incoming and outgoing administration have worked well together on key national security questions and that US adversaries should not try to exploit the transition. But the two presidents have never been more estranged.
Still, Biden is paying Trump the compliment of providing the one, vital thing that the 45th president didn’t offer him: an uncontested and peaceful transfer of power after a democratic election.
