President Trump’s refusal to allow President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his transition staff access to government offices, secure communications and classified briefings prompted growing warnings on Thursday, including from Republicans, that keeping Mr. Biden in the dark potentially endangers the country.
On Capitol Hill, several Senate Republicans insisted that Mr. Biden should at least be given access to the President’s Daily Brief, the compendium of the nation’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets and assessments of threats like terrorist plots and cyberattack vulnerabilities. Their call amounted to an acknowledgment that Mr. Biden will be declared the victor in the election.
“I don’t think they need to know everything,” Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Senate Republican leadership, said of Mr. Biden’s advisers. “I think they do need to know some things, and national security would be one of them.”
Democratic congressional leaders warned that Mr. Trump’s stonewalling is already doing damage to the country’s ability to deal with foreign leaders — Mr. Biden made his first contacts on unsecured telephone lines — and plans for how to handle the most high-risk period in the spread of the coronavirus and bolster the economic recovery. They added that Mr. Biden’s decades of experience in Washington will likely soften those consequences.
“It is most unfortunate that the Republicans have decided that they will not respect the will of the people, and let me just say: It’s like the house is burning down and they just refused to throw water on it,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said.
Deprived of access to secure government communications by the Trump administration, Mr. Biden’s team of more than 500 former officials and outside experts has embraced workarounds, talking over encrypted apps like Signal to shield their conversations from the Chinese, meeting in outdoor coffee shops with government officials they once worked alongside. The conversations are circumspect, both because of rules on both sides limiting how much information Mr. Biden’s team can seek and how much executive branch officials are allowed to say, participants said.
It may be weeks until Mr. Biden’s so-called agency review teams, made up of longtime government officials with deep roots in the bureaucracy, are let into the government departments that a Biden administration will run starting at noon on Jan. 20. Some issues can wait until a formal “ascertainment” is declared, giving them access to the offices and classified material.
But some cannot. Mr. Biden’s team is concerned that it is being shut out of planning for distribution of a coronavirus vaccine, a massive undertaking that the incoming administration expects to inherit the moment he is sworn in. Mr. Biden’s advisers say that they understand very little about the workings of Warp Speed, the project that has vaccine distribution planning well underway. The Biden team has not had access to the details.
For now, one senior adviser to the president-elect said, the coronavirus-related teams are focusing on logistical challenges and policy questions, like how to prioritize who gets a vaccine, and how to make distribution equitable along racial and socioeconomic lines — a priority of Mr. Biden’s, but one rarely discussed by Mr. Trump.
Access to the Trump distribution plan will become increasingly important “from an operational perspective,” so the Biden team can take over without any hiccups, said the senior adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal transition details.
The Biden team also hopes to implement a national testing strategy but will have to start from scratch, because the Trump administration does not have one. Biden advisers are seeking guidance from groups including the Rockefeller Foundation, which has drafted a national Covid-19 testing plan and is partnering with states and cities to expand testing efforts.
Mr. Biden’s aides say they have been warned not to get into detailed conversations with government officials, even career officials, until they receive the formal approval that transition has begun. But there is no prohibition on talking with officials who worked for the Trump administration and left — and there are many of them. And many informal conversations between former political officials and those career government officials who stayed on have been going on for four years — and never really stopped.
In many ways, what is happening now, officials said, is a reverse of four years ago — when President Barack Obama’s team was ready with detailed briefings and simulations of potential crises (including a pandemic flu), and Mr. Trump’s advisers were unwilling to receive them.
It’s not exactly a stampede, but Republican leaders are edging toward acknowledging President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, with Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio declaring him the winner — and a growing chorus of Senate Republicans pressing for Mr. Biden to be given classified intelligence briefings.
While only four sitting senators in the president’s party have publicly congratulated Mr. Biden, other Republicans are moving gingerly in that direction, and Republican state elections officials are pushing back against the Trump campaign’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
By Thursday, several top Republicans in the upper chamber — including Senators John Thune of South Dakota, the majority whip; Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — said the Trump administration should reverse its refusal to grant Mr. Biden access to the daily intelligence briefings.
Their statements were modest but were nonetheless a sign that the president’s so-called red wall on Capitol Hill might be more of a temporary barrier than a permanent political bulwark.
“We need to consider the former vice president as the president-elect. Joe Biden is the president-elect,” Mr. DeWine, who had previously taken a wait-and-see approach, told CNN on Thursday.
The shift began on Wednesday, when Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, told a radio station in Tulsa that he would intervene as soon as Friday if Trump administration appointees did not began sharing intelligence information with Mr. Biden.
Mr. Grassley, the longest serving Republican in the Senate, told reporters on Thursday that he thought Mr. Biden should be in the loop. “I would think — especially on classified briefings — the answer is yes,” he said.
“Yes, I think so,” Mr. Graham, a close Trump ally, also said about Mr. Biden receiving the briefings.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who has already congratulated Mr. Biden on his victory, was more emphatic. “President-elect Biden should be receiving intelligence briefings right now,” said Ms. Collins, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It’s probably the most important part of the transition.”
Two powerful forces are preventing most Republican senators from going further than pushing for the briefings: First is fear of Mr. Trump, who refuses to concede and threatens defectors. Second is the more acute factor of runoffs in January for Georgia’s two Senate seats, which will require near-maximum turnout from voters committed to Mr. Trump’s cause for Republicans to win both races.
After more than a week of vote counting and only periodic election calls, the shape and the resulting stakes of the next Senate have finally come into sharp relief: Party control will be determined by a pair of runoff elections in Georgia in January, and who wins those races will have profound implications on President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s policy agenda.
Senate race calls made on Wednesday formalized outcomes that were widely expected, with Senators Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both Republicans, holding onto their seats and giving their party a 50-to-48 advantage.
If Republicans win either Georgia race on Jan. 5, they will maintain control of the chamber. Democrats must win both seats in the traditionally conservative state to leverage Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote and take control.
If Democrats do win both races, close aides to Mr. Biden and economists who helped advise his campaign say the president-elect will try to push through a large stimulus plan for the flagging economic recovery — most likely along the lines of the $2.2 trillion that House Democrats approved this fall.
His stimulus plan under such a scenario would include hundreds of billions of dollars for state and local governments that have lost tax revenue amid the pandemic recession, extended unemployment benefits for people who lost jobs during the crisis and a new round of aid for small businesses.
Mr. Biden’s team is also developing a government employment program — called the Public Health Jobs Corps — that would put 100,000 Americans to work on virus testing and contact tracing.
A narrow majority in the Senate would also give Mr. Biden the chance to push through tax increases on corporations and the rich to fund ambitious plans like rebuilding roads and bridges, speeding the transition to carbon-free energy and helping Americans afford health care.
But if Republicans win at least one Georgia seat, Mr. Biden will most likely need to settle for a wave of executive actions that would bring more incremental progress toward his policy goals while trying to cut compromise deals with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader.
Tax increases, even for the ultrarich, would almost certainly be off the table, as would expanding the Affordable Care Act to give Americans the ability to buy into a government insurance program like Medicare. Mr. Biden would continue to push for infrastructure and health care bills, economists around him say, but he would be unlikely to win support for his full agenda in those areas.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke on Thursday with Pope Francis, who joined other foreign dignitaries in congratulating the former vice president on his election victory, the Biden transition team said.
The transition office said that Mr. Biden thanked the pope for “promoting peace, reconciliation, and the common bonds of humanity around the world,” and pledged to work with the pontiff on climate change and “caring for the marginalized and the poor.” Mr. Biden also spoke of working with the pope on “welcoming and integrating immigrants and refugees into our communities,” a sharp contrast from the current policies of President Trump, who has strictly tightened American borders to limit the entry of migrants and refugees.
The call holds particular significance for Mr. Biden, a lifelong Catholic and only the second Catholic to occupy the White House, after President John F. Kennedy.
“My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion,” Mr. Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep.” (He added that the influence was as much cultural as theological.)
Mr. Biden has expressed public admiration for the current pope.
“Politics is something more noble than posturing, marketing, and media spin,” Biden said in a speech last month, quoting Pope Francis. “These sow nothing but division, conflict, and a bleak cynicism.”
President Trump, by contrast, openly tangled with Pope Francis during the 2016 campaign and had tense relations with the Vatican over issues like climate change, immigration and China. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Rome in September, Pope Francis declined to meet with him, apparently angered by Mr. Pompeo’s claims that the Vatican “endangers its moral authority” by agreeing to deals with Beijing regarding church operations in China. (Mr. Pompeo met with Catholic critics of the Pope instead.)
Mr. Biden has held calls with at least seven world leaders this week, bolstering a clear global consensus that he is the rightfully elected American president even as President Trump continues his false claims that the election was marred by fraud and that Mr. Biden lost.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke with three more foreign leaders on Wednesday, in the latest show of international support for his election victory. He committed to an early meeting with one: President Moon Jae-in of South Korea.
In a statement, the Biden transition team said the president-elect had participated in “congratulatory calls” with Mr. Moon, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan. The calls with three of America’s closest allies came the day after four that Mr. Biden held with Western European allies, in a return to traditional diplomatic protocol after years of President Trump’s haphazard foreign interactions.
Mr. Biden spoke with each leader about the coronavirus pandemic, the global economy and “strengthening democracy,” according to descriptions of the calls from the transition office. While the State Department would typically help facilitate such calls for a president-elect and supply him with translators if necessary, a source familiar with Mr. Biden’s calls over the past two days said the Trump administration had refused to provide such assistance.
But even as Mr. Trump continues to make false charges of voter fraud and claims to be the true winner of the election, virtually all of the world’s major leaders have now acknowledged that Mr. Biden will be inaugurated in January. The few holdouts include two autocratic allies of President Trump — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil — as well as President Xi Jinping of China.
In a Twitter post, Mr. Moon said he and Mr. Biden affirmed their countries’ “robust” alliance and desire for a “peaceful and prosperous” Korean Peninsula.
During their 14-minute phone call, Mr. Moon noted Mr. Biden’s “long experience in state affairs, his excellent leadership and clear vision,” said Mr. Moon’s spokesman, Kang Min-seok. Mr. Biden praised South Korea’s largely successful fight against the coronavirus, comparing it with the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic.
The two leaders agreed to meet as soon as possible after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Kang said.
Mr. Moon’s government hopes that the Biden administration will restart stalled negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and drop Mr. Trump’s talk of reducing U.S. troop presence in South Korea, which now numbers 28,500.
“As president, I’ll stand with South Korea, strengthening our alliance to safeguard peace in East Asia and beyond, rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops,” Mr. Biden had written in an opinion column published by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency days before the election.
transcript
transcript
Schumer and Pelosi Call for Virus Relief Package
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“The Republicans should stop their shenanigans about an election that President Trump has already lost, and focus their attention on the immediate issue at hand: providing relief to a country living through the Covid health and economic crises. This election was more — maybe more a referendum on who can handle Covid well than anything else. The Donald Trump approach was repudiated, the Joe Biden approach was embraced and that’s why we think there is a better chance to get a bill in the lame duck, if only the Republicans would stop embracing the ridiculous shenanigans that Trump is forcing them to do that this, you know in the election, and focus on what people need.” “This is a red alert and all hands on deck. But it should have been a long time ago. The president and the Republicans in Congress have ignored by delay, distortion, denial. Deaths have been caused, and what are they doing now? Continuing to ignore in spite of these numbers. They’re engaged in an absurd circus, right now, refusing to accept reality. The Republicans are shamefully pretending a proceeding without recognizing what our responsibility is, and making it even harder to address the massive health and economic crisis that we’re facing.”
Top congressional Democrats renewed calls for a sweeping coronavirus relief package on Thursday, insisting that voters had given President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his party a mandate to fight the pandemic aggressively.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader in the Senate, cited record-breaking infections across the country, along with the presidential election results, to justify their position that any package must be much larger than what Republicans had been suggesting.
By holding firm to keeping $2.4 trillion in new spending as their starting point, Democrats appeared to be closing the door on the possibility of a year-end compromise with Republicans, who have proposed spending a fraction of that amount.
“This election was maybe more a referendum on who can handle Covid well than anything else,” Mr. Schumer said. “The Donald Trump approach was repudiated and the Joe Biden approach was embraced. That is why we think there is a better chance of getting a deal in the lame duck.”
Hours after their remarks, the top Democrats talked to Mr. Biden by phone, stressing in a statement afterward that they were on the same page about the “urgent need” for Congress to provide funds to support Americans struggling in the pandemic, as well as the nation’s health care system, before he takes office. It had been unclear how actively Mr. Biden, the incoming head of the party, would involve himself in negotiations before his inauguration.
Leaders in both parties have acknowledged the need for another round of stimulus, but they have yet to agree on the scope and cost of a second package, with Republicans insisting on a much smaller bill than what Democrats — and even the White House — had been advocating ahead of the election.
But the potential for agreement appeared to narrow further on Thursday, with a top Republican indicating that Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, was no longer planning to rely on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to cut a deal with Democrats.
“There hasn’t been any discussion yet between McConnell and Pelosi, but McConnell is not going to rely on Mnuchin anymore to do the dealing,” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters on Thursday morning. “I think he’s intending to take it over and try to get something going.”
Mr. McConnell, for his part, told reporters on Capitol Hill that “my view is, the level at which the economy is improving further underscores that we need to do something at about the amount that we put on the floor in September and October,” referring to the targeted $500 billion packages Senate Republicans tried to pass before the election.
The price tag Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer were discussing, he said, “is not a place I think we’re willing to go, but I do think there needs to another package.”
But Ms. Pelosi portrayed Republicans as “cold-hearted” for insisting on a smaller relief package and tried to upbraid them.
“It’s like the house is burning down and they just refuse to throw water on it,” she said.
Both sides will also have to reach an agreement on critical spending legislation to prevent a lapse in government funding on Dec. 11, with either an agreement on the dozen annual must-pass bills or another stopgap spending bill.
Nine days after the election, the basic results are clear: Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the presidency, Democrats kept control of the House but with a smaller majority, and control of the Senate will hinge on runoffs in January for Georgia’s two seats.
But 14 House contests remain uncalled — as do Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina in the presidential race, though they won’t change the final result. Here’s an overview of the vote counts in the House races as of Thursday afternoon.
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California, 21st District: Republican David Valadao is leading Representative T.J. Cox, a Democrat, by 2.8 percentage points with 91 percent of estimated votes reported.
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California, 25th District: Representative Mike Garcia, a Republican, is leading Christy Smith, a Democrat, by just four-hundredths of a percentage point — 159 votes — with more than 98 percent of estimated votes reported.
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California, 39th District: Young Kim, a Republican, is leading Representative Gil Cisneros, a Democrat, by 1.2 percentage points with more than 98 percent of estimated votes reported.
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Iowa, Second District: Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican, is leading Rita Hart, a Democrat, by two-hundredths of a percentage point — just 48 votes — with 89 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New Jersey, Seventh District: Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat, is leading Thomas Kean, a Republican, by two percentage points with 90 percent of estimated votes counted. The Associated Press called this race for Mr. Malinowski days ago, but the race has tightened since then, and The Times has withdrawn its call.
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New York, First District: Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican, is leading Nancy Goroff, a Democrat, by more than 20 percentage points with 77 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, Second District: Andrew Garbarino, a Republican, is leading Jackie Gordon, a Democrat, by more than 15 percentage points with 78 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, Third District: George Santos, a Republican, is leading Representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, by 1.5 percentage points with 72 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, 11th District: Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, is leading Representative Max Rose, a Democrat, by more than 15 percentage points with 85 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, 18th District: Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat, is leading Chele Farley, a Republican, by 2.9 percentage points with 78 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, 19th District: Representative Antonio Delgado, a Democrat, is leading Kyle Van De Water, a Republican, by three percentage points with 81 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, 22nd District: Claudia Tenney, a Republican, is leading Representative Anthony Brindisi, a Democrat, by 11 percentage points with 80 percent of estimated votes reported.
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New York, 24th District: Representative John Katko, a Republican, is leading Dana Balter, a Democrat, by more than 20 percentage points with 78 percent of estimated votes reported.
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Utah, Fourth District: Burgess Owens, Republican, is leading Representative Ben McAdams, a Democrat, by about half a percentage point with more than 98 percent of estimated votes counted.
Even though President Trump and his allies have been claiming loudly for days that the presidential election has been compromised by widespread fraud, at least one person close to Mr. Trump has rejected that argument: the lawyer representing him in an election case in Phoenix.
At a hearing in the case on Thursday afternoon, the lawyer, Kory Langhofer, told a judge in Maricopa County Superior Court that the case that the Trump campaign filed in Phoenix was not about fraud but rather “good-faith errors” in the vote-counting process.
“This is not a fraud case,” Mr. Langhofer said. “We are not alleging fraud. We are not saying anyone is trying to steal the election.”
Late last week, Mr. Langhofer filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Trump campaign concerning one of the stranger controversies of the election: the “Sharpiegate” dispute.
Mr. Langhofer’s suit claims that an untold number of voters in Maricopa County used Sharpie pens on their ballots and that “ink bleeds” caused problems with voting machines. The suit says that because of “systemic poll worker error,” thousands of votes cast with Sharpies were not counted for Mr. Trump in Arizona.
State officials dismissed it as “a conspiracy theory,” noting that the Arizona attorney general had conducted an inquiry into the matter and found that the use of Sharpies in Maricopa County “did not result in disenfranchisement.”
A Maricopa County election official testified at the hearing that out of the more than 165,000 votes cast there in the president election, only 191 were potentially tainted.
Almost from the moment the election ended, President Trump and his allies have relentlessly attacked the integrity of both the voting and vote counting, a narrative they have sought to advance in nearly 20 lawsuits filed in the past eight days as they refuse to concede the race to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
While these suits have alleged systemic fraud in at least five states, the evidence offered has fallen short of that. At least so far, the arguments offered in these cases have been limited, narrow and, according to several judges and experts, unlikely to affect — let alone to overturn — the outcome of the race.
In some of the cases, emergency requests to stop the counting of votes or invalidate some votes have been denied by judges, some of whom have treated the campaign’s lawyers to scathing commentary from the bench.
Here are some examples:
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Nevada — A suit filed there last week by Trump allies was intended to stop elections officials from using a vote-counting software that they claimed was illegal. The lawyers based their case on a single sworn statement by a voter named Jill Stokke, who tried to vote on Oct. 28, but was told someone had already returned her ballot by mail. A judge denied the request.
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Michigan — Republican poll challengers filed a lawsuit in state court claiming there were multiple fraud conspiracies in the voting and counting in Detroit. The case was based in part on an affidavit from a poll worker who said voters were being pressured to vote for Mr. Biden. A similar suit was filed in federal court on Wednesday, and included complaints from Republican poll workers who said they were made to feel uncomfortable at polling places in Detroit or felt local elections officials had treated them poorly.
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Pennsylvania — Four state residents — a farmer, a retired pastor, a nurse anesthetist and a corrections officer — filed a suit in Federal District Court in Williamsport, Pa., alleging that state elections officials cheated during the vote count in several counties. State lawyers dismissed the suit as a group of “unsubstantiated stacked hearsay allegations” that was founded on a “hope that their unidentified expert will analyze data they do not have.”
Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign adviser who has been working on efforts to bring lawsuits contesting the election outcome in several states, tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday, a person briefed on the diagnosis said Thursday.
He attended a crowded election night party at the White House that several other people who later tested positive also attended. The latest figure to join their ranks was Jeff Miller, a Republican strategist, according to a person with knowledge of the situation on Thursday.
Several hundred people gathered at the election night event in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled and watched election returns.
Mr. Lewandowski had been in Philadelphia for days since attending the event, and believes he may have contracted it there, the person said.
The other people who had previously tested positive after attending the election night event were: Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff; Ben Carson, the housing secretary; David Bossie, an adviser to Mr. Trump who is leading the charge on the election-related lawsuits and other efforts; and Brian Jack, the White House political director.
After another event at the White House — a celebration of Mr. Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Sept. 26 — more than a dozen aides, reporters and guests who were in attendance or came into contact with people who were there tested positive for the virus. Mr. Trump also tested positive and was hospitalized for a few days in early October.
Richard Walters, the chief of staff of the Republican National Committee, has also tested positive for the virus, according to a person with knowledge with the situation. He did not attend the election night event at the White House.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s abrupt installation of a group of hard-line loyalists into senior jobs at the Pentagon has elevated officials who have pushed for more aggressive actions against Iran and for an imminent withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan over the objections of the military.
Mr. Trump made the appointments of four top Pentagon officials, including a new acting defense secretary, this week, leaving civilian and military officials to interpret whether this indicated a change in approach in the final two months of his presidency. Mr. Trump also named Michael Ellis as a general counsel at the National Security Agency over the objections of the director, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone.
There is no evidence so far that these new appointees harbor a secret agenda on Iran or have taken up their posts with an action plan in hand. But their sudden appearance has been a purge of the Pentagon’s top civilian hierarchy without recent precedent.
Most of the officials and former officials interviewed this week agreed that there was a large element of score-settling and attention-grabbing by Mr. Trump and his aides as they have defied calls to concede to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The Postal Service’s inspector general has informed Congress that a worker who had made allegations of ballot corruption at a facility in Erie, Pa., had disavowed his claims, which Republicans had called evidence of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania’s voting.
Richard Hopkins, a postal employee in Erie, “completely” recanted allegations that a supervisor was “tampering with mail-in ballots” after investigators questioned him, the inspector general’s office said on Tuesday, according to the Democratic leadership of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
Not long after the Democrats’ announcement, Project Veritas — a conservative group that researchers say has run a disinformation campaign to delegitimize the voting process — released a video in which Mr. Hopkins said that he had not actually recanted his statements.
Mr. Hopkins had claimed in a sworn affidavit given to President Trump’s campaign that he overheard what he believed to be a discussion about backdating postmarks on ballots that arrived at the postal facility after Election Day.
Ballots must have been postmarked by Election Day, Nov. 3, to count. The implication of Mr. Hopkins’s claim was that postal workers had backdated ballots that should have been disqualified.
In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots received after Election Day have been separated from those that arrived by Nov. 3 and have not been counted yet. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has won Pennsylvania without them.
Only about 130 mail-in ballots arrived after Election Day, out of about 135,000 ballots cast in Erie County, the chairman of the county’s board of elections said in a statement.
MOSCOW — When the strongman ruler of Belarus declared an implausible landslide victory in an election in August and had himself sworn in for a sixth term as president, the United States and other Western nations denounced what they said was brazen defiance of the voters’ will.
President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s victory, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month, was “fraud.” Mr. Pompeo added: “We’ve opposed the fact that he’s now inaugurated himself. We know what the people of Belarus want. They want something different.”
Just a month later, Mr. Pompeo’s boss, President Trump, is now borrowing from Mr. Lukashenko’s playbook, joining a club of truculent leaders who, regardless of what voters decide, declare themselves the winners of elections.
That club counts as its members far more dictators, tyrants and potentates than leaders of what used to be known as the “free world” — countries that, led by Washington, have for decades lectured others on the need to hold elections and respect the result.
The parallel is not exact. Mr. Trump participated in a free and fair democratic election. Most autocrats defy voters before they even vote, excluding real rivals from the ballot and swamping the airwaves with one-sided coverage.
But when they do hold genuinely competitive votes and the result goes against them, they often ignore the result, denouncing it as the work of traitors, criminals and foreign saboteurs, and therefore invalid. By refusing to accept the results of last week’s election and working to delegitimize the vote, Mr. Trump is following a similar strategy.
The United States has never before had to force an incumbent to concede a fair defeat at the polls. And merely by raising the possibility that he would have to be forced out of office, Mr. Trump has shattered the bedrock democratic tradition of a seamless transition.