Insiders fear Trump will play dirty over conspiracy theories just like with Obama. Here’s how Biden fights it

Obstruction from Republicans over the President-elect's agenda will also be coming, but Biden just has to remember what carried him to victory in the election

When Joseph Robinette Biden Jr is sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, his ascension to the nation’s highest office will take place under circumstances that bear striking similarities to those that confronted Barack Obama in 2009.

Like Obama, Biden will take office as the focus of Republican investigations meant to discredit his administration and as the subject of conspiracy theories spread by Donald Trump for the purpose of casting doubt on his legitimacy. According to strategists and insiders from both parties, how Biden chooses to respond will be among the most important decisions of his presidency.

Since Biden was declared the president-elect last Saturday, Trump, his campaign staff, and his allies in both Congress and the conservative media have relentlessly promoted a series of baseless claims which purport to explain Biden’s victory as the result of cheating, mostly by Black Democrats living in major cities such as Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia – despite them casting legal ballots.

The various theories circulating in conservative media — many flowing from Trump’s legal team or his Twitter account — range from the farfetched to the ridiculous and have largely been all but laughed out of court by a series of federal and state judges.

According to two sources familiar with Trump’s thinking, Trump has no intention of conceding the election to Biden and plans to continue indulging the fiction that he was robbed of a second term by rampant fraud perpetrated on Biden’s behalf, just as he spent years promoting “birtherism,” the baseless conspiracy theory which posited that Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was a Kenyan-born Muslim and therefore ineligible to serve as president.

Biden will also need to contend with Congressional Republicans who plan on continuing the groundless investigations into him and his son Hunter, the exact sort of nakedly political probe which Trump had hoped to extract as a concession from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in exchange for the release of roughly $400 million in defense assistance funds (an effort which led directly to Trump’s impeachment last year).

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, vowed to continue investigations into the Bidens and the 2016 election during the Senate’s lame duck session and beyond.

“We’re not going to stop,” he said as he finished a hearing on the FBI’s probe into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Graham’s presumed successor as chair — Iowa Republican Charles Grassley — has also requested information from the Justice Department about Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and several Republican Senators have expressed a desire to begin investigations into many of the so-called irregularities which Trump and his campaign have suggested are behind his losses in several key states.

Kurt Bardella, who served as a spokesperson for the then-GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee from 2009 to 2011, said House and Senate Republicans’ thirst for investigations could pose a danger to the Biden administration regardless of whether Democrats are able to take control of both chambers of Congress by prevailing in the upcoming Senate special elections in Georgia.

“No matter what happens in Georgia, the reality is Republicans have continually relied on a playbook that they started to use back in 2009… and from the minority with no actual power, Republicans in Congress, were able to use the bully pulpit and the media to orchestrate and execute an aggressive oversight strategy designed to put the White House on the defensive,” he said. “The playbook was very successful, and it’s one of the reasons that Republicans were able to then use it to help gain the majority in 2010 and effectively — from a congressional standpoint —end the Obama presidency.”

Bardella said he believes Republicans will weaponise Biden’s desire for unity to force his administration to cooperate with the sorts of investigations that the Trump administration ignored as a matter of course.

“There will be a tremendous amount of hypocrisy on display as Republicans start calling for oversight and accountability and transparency after they’ve given Donald Trump a blank check for four years,” he predicted.

Asked whether the Biden administration should take advantage of the precedents created by the Trump administration’s constant flouting of oversight requests from Democrats, Bardella said Democrats and the Biden White House should instead “exert an aggressive posture” of retroactive oversight of the last four years.

“There are four years of waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement and outright corruption that have occurred during these during the Trump presidency, and the things that we know about are disturbing enough but there are plenty of things that we don’t know about that have transpired,” he said. “There is no shortage of material that the new administration could put out there every single day and put Republicans in Congress on the defensive… it could be something that could effectively neutralise congressional Republicans as they try to go after the Biden administration.”

But another prominent ex-Republican, former GOP chair Michael Steele, said Biden should avoid a tit-for-tat fight over sham investigations and conspiracy theories by shutting them down with sheer force of personality.

“I think, Biden… in a sort of… fatherly or grandfatherly way… is going have to tell people: ‘No, that’s not right, that’s not true, that’s not who we are’” when confronted with conspiracy theories, Steele said, by stressing the ways in which “the space we’ve just gotten into is treacherous for the country”.

Steele said those Republicans who are preemptively rejecting Biden’s legitimacy are “feeding off of” the rhetoric being served up by Trump and his allies in conservative media, and posited that Biden could face a nigh-impossible task in getting those Americans who are still following Trump’s lead on his side.

“It’s just going to be hard, because you’ve got 45 or 50 per cent of the population that doesn’t believe that you’re a legitimate president and the guy you beat should be in the office… so how do you overcome that? I don’t know,” said Steele, who posited that it might take “some national or international event” to “snap people out of this delusional stupidity around Trump that just keeps fermenting”.

“The only way I see this breaking is with something that shakes the nation’s attention in such a way that they realize that we need a president to handle a matter or to deal with a problem,” he added.

But Rick Tyler, a Republican consultant who served as communications director for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Biden could get past Congressional Republicans’ attempts to delegitimise him by taking his agenda directly to the American people.

“The answer is always the same — it’s leadership — in a constitutional republic, that’s the ability to compromise with the other side and get the requisite number of votes to move an agenda forward,” he said. “And the way you move an agenda forward is not by counting votes in the House, not by convincing McConnell, not convincing Speaker Pelosi, and not convincing Kevin McCarthy, because they are all bit players in a much larger act.”

“The way to move the Congress is to move the country… because they’re all followers, and they’ll do exactly what their constituents desire. Biden simply has to articulate an agenda that’s visionary, that people want, and communicate why it’s better for people. Then people will be convinced and they’ll tell their members of Congress,” he continued, adding that Republicans “can cry all they want about fraud and illegitimacy while Biden gives the country what it wants by starting with things that their constituents need, like roads and bridges”.

On the subject of whether Democrats could use retroactive investigations of the Trump administration to push back on Republican shenanigans, Steele said the only way to properly investigate the last four years without it taking over Biden’s presidency is through handing the task off to Congress or a special prosecutor.

“If I’m President, I don’t touch that — I work with Congress or… through an independent counsel,” he said, because doing otherwise would provoke a firestorm in the conservative press.  

Michael Starr Hopkins, a Democratic strategist, suggested that the Biden administration should avoid investigating Trump himself by leaving such tasks to state-level investigators such as New York City District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

“If the federal side ends up going after Trump, that will be the entire story for the first two years heading into 2022, and we know the incumbent party loses seats, and we have just the narrowest of margins in the House, so let New York State take the lead on Trump,” he said, adding that Biden’s Justice Department would do well to allow a special prosecutor to handle investigation of any potential wrongdoing by members of Trump’s administration.

“Because of the echo chamber in right-wing media, [a federal investigation of Trump] will be such a dominating factor while we’re trying to get Covid-19 legislation done, trying to make repairs to the Affordable Care Act, and trying to fix our tax code,” he continued. “And because Biden has relationships with Republicans, he has to stay out of whatever happens.”

But Bardella, the former House Oversight spokesperson, said Biden and Congressional Democrats need to stop being so worried about a backlash from people who would question Biden’s legitimacy because they believe ridiculous conspiracies.

“I think that everybody needs to stop caring what Republicans say and do because they have zero credibility. They’re hypocrites, they’re liars, they are accomplices in the hijacking of our democracy, and we need to assume that whatever the worst possible thing that they can say is, they will indeed say it,” he said.  

“When someone has already demonstrated that they’re going to be a raving lunatic conspiracy theorist, there’s no reason to listen to them any more," he added. “We need to go back to that standard of stop giving credibility and oxygen to these fools and return to the business of taking people who deserve to be taken seriously, seriously.”