'A republic, if you can keep it'

 

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

CNN

Donald Trump’s second-term fantasy just fizzled.

 

The killer blow to Trump’s tumultuous presidency came late Monday afternoon, when a previously obscure US government official, Emily Murphy, finally triggered the official presidential transition – nearly three weeks after Joe Biden won the election. Meanwhile, the outgoing President's ridiculous legal challenges are crumbling, key states keep certifying his election defeat and Biden started naming his Cabinet.

 

The transition unleashes millions of dollars in funds for the President-elect to prepare for power and compels the current administration to brief the incoming team. That doesn't necessarily mean Trump himself will cooperate with the transition, though. In a face-saving tweet, the President insisted that it was he who had ordered Murphy to begin the transfer of power -- but his remaining two months in office leave him plenty of time to try to sabotage Biden’s administration.

We may never get a formal concession from Trump, who's likely to walk out of the Oval Office in January still insisting the election was stolen. But the bedrock of American democracy appears to have narrowly survived him. Asked in 1787 what kind of government the United States had, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin reputedly responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” This year, the state and local officials and judges who rejected Trump’s attempts to invalidate millions of votes did just that.