Trump lashes out at transition as Biden pushes policies
President-elect Trump is ripping President Biden over what he says is a difficult transition period, expressing frustration with the current president for still seeking to set policies that fly in the face of what he would support.
Trump has railed against Biden, particularly after he issued executive orders to restrict offshore drilling on the East and West coasts, with Trump claiming such acts make the changeover hard because it gives him more work to undo.
“Trump’s view is that we won and you should just lay down, surrender your arms,” a source close to Trump world said.
Biden, in a USA Today interview this week, said he asked Trump not to try to “settle scores” during their first meeting to start the presidential transition in November. And the president said Trump even praised him, especially on his work on the economy.
But after the president made moves to protect his legacy before leaving office, particularly when it comes to the environment, Trump began railing about his soon-to-be predecessor.
“Biden is doing everything possible to make the TRANSITION as difficult [as] possible, from Lawfare such as has never been seen before, to costly and ridiculous Executive Orders on the Green New Scam and other money wasting Hoaxes,” Trump said on Truth Social.
The source close to Trump world said the clash represents each man holding their ground.
“The Bidens have decided that they’re not going to turn the keys over, meaning around power and authority to exercise their decision-making until the actual [transition] of power,” the source said.
“From Trump’s point of view, any continued regulatory activity, decision-making that Biden does is more complicated. But from the Biden perspective, they’re just doing what they get to do is because they are still president,” the source added.
Others in Trump’s world have taken a different view.
Incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said in an Axios interview this week that Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients has been very helpful and even invited her over to his house for dinner.
The incoming chief told Axios that Zients “has made great suggestions, helped make sure we stay on time with required functions, helped us navigate the labyrinth that is the Executive Office of the President, and been very professional.”
A Republican source familiar with the transition said Trump and Wiles’s differing perspectives involve separate aspects of the transition.
“They are speaking about two different things — Trump is upset that Biden is issuing a raft of new policies on the way out the door that will make life more difficult for him. Wiles is talking solely about transition and transfer of power process,” the GOP source said.
The Biden order on Monday that set Trump off blocks new drilling off the entire East Coast, as well as California, Oregon and Washington state, and blocks some drilling off Alaska’s coast in portions of the Northern Bering Sea and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
Trump, meanwhile, has promised to promote domestic energy production when he is sworn in and one of the signature lines of his campaign was “drill baby, drill!” Trump vowed to undo Biden’s recent executive order, though it’s unclear if he would be able to reverse it.
The source close to Trump world called Trump and Wiles’s narrative on the transition “a tale of two worlds,” saying Wiles’s perspective is that the transition is going well on the operational side while Trump thinks Biden should stop acting as president in the final weeks.
Meanwhile, Biden has suggested the transition process has been friendly — at least at the beginning of it.
Days after winning the 2024 election, Trump went to the White House for a meeting, which Wiles and Zients also joined. Biden and Trump appeared to be collegial after heavily railing against each other on the campaign trail when Biden was still running for reelection.
The White House has maintained it was doing everything it could to make the transition go as smoothly as possible, but as of Tuesday, Trump though doubled down on his criticism of Biden, who appears to be getting under his skin with his eleventh-hour actions.
“They say we’re going to have a smooth transition. All they do is talk. It’s all talk. Everything they do is talk, ‘we’re going to have a smooth transition.’ And then they take 625 million acres, and they essentially landmark it, so you can’t ever drill there again,” the president-elect said.
To be sure, Biden is expected to leave the White House with little fanfare. He hasn’t spoken much to the media in recent months, other than the USA Today interview, and isn’t expected to give a wide-ranging press conference to wrap up his term.
But any last-minute executive orders or actions are sure to irk Trump, despite the fact that last-minute moves by an outgoing president are typical.
In January 2021, when he was moving out of the White House after losing the 2020 race, Trump signed 14 executive orders, according to the Federal Register.
Trump issued executive orders to ensure Americans have notice of punishment for violations of regulations, to ensure the security of Unmanned Aircraft Systems operated by the federal government and to lift a five-year lobbying ban for members of his administration just hours before he left office, among others.
“The last few days of an administration often see a flurry of executive orders. The Trump administration is no exception, and former President Donald Trump is making the most of this tradition,” the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote at the time, hailing Trump’s last-minute policies.
Republicans too are bashing Biden for final actions, including Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who said this week that moves to ban offshore drilling, grant clemency to hundreds of Americans convicted of crimes, and reportedly to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the Taliban are a “slap in the face” to Trump voters.
Biden last month commuted the sentence of nearly every prisoner on death row. Trump, meanwhile, issued a flurry of pardons for former top campaign and White House officials on his way out in 2021.
The president is expected to make more last-minute decisions before he leaves Washington.
“After inheriting an economy in freefall and skyrocketing violent crime, President Biden is proud to leave his successor the best-performing economy on earth, the lowest violent crime rates in over 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in over four years,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said.