Trump’s Trumpy Transition Saps Biden and Himself

The one serious skill President Donald Trump has is his ability to draw attention from the news media. That helped him enormously when seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 and 2016, then probably hurt him a bit during the general election campaign in 2016. During his presidency, Trump’s ability to draw attention was sort of irrelevant to both governing and to his popularity, given that presidents draw plenty of attention regardless of the person involved, but his quest for it was probably a distraction from better uses of his time.

Now Trump is giving every sign of attempting to maintain his TV ratings during the transition to President-elect Joe Biden. He’s pretending to contest an election that’s not particularly close, with plans to resume rallies to spread false, evidence-free claims of fraud. And he fired — “terminated,” as he described it on Twitter — Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Tuesday, with rumors swirling about other pointless executions to come.