Thirteen dozen former national security officials, who served President Trump and predecessors of both parties, warned Thursday that a "serious risk to national security" has been created by the administration's refusal to formally recognize Joe Biden as president-elect.
Their declaration was the latest escalation of apprehension about the tenuous state of American democracy on the fifth day since election returns made clear Trump has been defeated.
Biden is on course to win 306 electoral votes and a popular vote margin above 5.3 million — at 51 percent, the biggest share for a candidate challenging an incumbent since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover 88 years ago. Far from conceding defeat, though, Trump is holed up in the White House, helping raise money for a sprawling courthouse campaign in five swing states hoping to stall if not reverse the inevitable — so far, without offering any credible evidence he's a victim of significant election fraud.
Meantime, he has told administration officials to refuse all cooperation with the Biden transition. That has included the head of the General Services Administration, who has declined to follow her predecessors after all previous clearcut elections and sign the paperwork permitting the mechanics of the transfer of power to get started.
The former officials told GSA Administrator Emily Murphy to do so right away so Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris can see information "needed to address pressing national security issues, such as the President's Daily Briefing and pending decisions on possible uses of military force."
The signatories include former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden; retired Gen. Wesley Clark and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Several of Trump's former ambassadors, National Security Council officials and Department of Homeland Security political appointees also signed.
Known colloquially as the PDB, the President's Daily Brief is a classified document compiled each morning for the president and his senior advisers by the director of national intelligence to assess the day's top national security threats and global hot spots. While Biden could not act, for the next 10 weeks, on anything he saw, it would inform his public statements and perhaps his national security appointments — and would allow him to be up to speed as soon as the decision-making falls to him.
The GSA administrator at the end of Bill Clinton's administration, David Barram, similarly declined to "ascertain" the 2000 winner until the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of George W. Bush — but Clinton allowed Bush to read the PDB throughout the six-week standoff over the tiny margin in Florida.
"In this moment of uncertainty, we must put politics aside," the letter to Murphy said. "Further delaying the Biden team's ability to access the President's Daily Briefing and other national security information and resources compromises the continuity and readiness of our national leadership, with immense national security stakes hanging in the balance."
By Thursday afternoon, at least five senior Republican senators had called separately for Biden to be given access to the intelligence briefings even while Trump continues to fight the election: Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Jim Lankford of Oklahoma
"It's probably the most important part of the transition," said Collins, a member of the Intelligence Committee.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.