An all-star cast of national security officials from Republican and Democratic administrations on Monday pulled out what they hope will be the "Trump card" that compels the incumbent president to concede the election and permit his successor to start receiving intelligence briefings and build his team of experts.
Their ace-in-the-hole argument: Remember Sept. 11.
But the pleas from the likes of two former secretaries of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano and Michael Chertoff, continued to fall on deaf ears. On the 10th day since election results made it clear he had lost, President Trump was back on Twitter claiming "I won the Election."
Amid his flurry of six tweets pressing various conspiracy theories, Trump's lawyers appeared to abandon their only legal argument involving enough votes to potentially upend the outcome in one of the states decisive in his defeat. In this case, Pennsylvania.
So far, Trump has not allowed President-elect Joe Biden to begin receiving the daily intelligence briefings that are a key part of keeping track of threats to the United States. And the presidential appointee in charge of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, has refused to sign the document that would free up money and office space for the Biden transition team.
At a news conference sponsored by a coalition of democracy reform groups, Napolitano, a Democrat, and Chertoff, a Republican, each cited the final report by the 9/11 Commission, which said the disputed 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush caused a delay in Bush nominating and winning Senate confirmation for top national security positions. And that in turn led to a "disruption of national security policymaking" that contributed to the government's inability to prevent the al-Qaida attacks.
Former GOP Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey, who was chairman of the 9/11 Commission, noted that the report recommended a smooth transition between administrations. He called it "criminal" that Biden was not able to receive the daily intelligence briefing.
The officials were convened by a pair of coalitions assembled to push for an orderly end to the election, the National Task Force on Election Crises and Citizens for a Strong Democracy, along with the democracy reform group, Issue One. (It owns, but is journalistically walled off from, The Fulcrum.)
But the panelists conceded that there was not much that could be done, beyond encouraging public pressure, to force the transition process ahead.
Hope for progress toward a belated but orderly transfer of power emerged like a tiny sapling in a fire-ravaged forest on Sunday, when Trump seemed to offer the cutest possible concession and then took it back.
Without using Biden's name, Trump said that "He won" as part of a tweet making more baseless claims about a "rigged" election. But when his comments were widely interpreted as his first public acknowledgment of the election's real result, Trump quickly reversed course.
By Monday, Trump was back to claiming victory on Twitter and continuing to claim fraud. One sample: "The Radical Left Democrats, working with their partner, the Fake News Media, are trying to STEAL this Election. We won't let them!"
Many of his tweets included Twitter-imposed disclaimers noting that his statements were in dispute.
On the legal front, his campaign on Sunday dropped a major part of a federal lawsuit challenging the election results in Pennsylvania. His attorneys filed a revised lawsuit removing charges that election officials violated the campaign's rights by limiting the ability of its observers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to watch the votes being counted. Their hope was to get 682,479 tabulated votes tossed out as a result.
What remains of the lawsuit, even if true, is not going to cause the result of the Pennsylvania race to change, Democratic officials said. But Trump campaign officials said their argument could still result in several hundred thousand votes being disallowed. Biden carried its 20 electoral votes by 56,000 votes.
The Trump team already has piled up a string of additional losses in its attempts to use the courts to reverse the election outcome or at least sow doubt about the process.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.