When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge – and I don’t mean the pandemic, although COVID-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.
It goes without saying that Trump, whose conspiracy theories are getting wilder and wilder, will never concede, and that millions of his followers will always believe – or at least say they believe – that the election was stolen.
Most Republicans in Congress certainly know this is a lie. Biden won the popular vote by a large margin.
The only real questions are how much harm the GOP can do and how Biden will respond.
The answer to the first question depends a lot on what happens in the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoffs. If Democrats win both seats, they’ll have effective though narrow control of both houses of Congress. If they don’t, Mitch McConnell will have enormous powers of obstruction – and anyone who doubts that he’ll use those powers to undermine Biden at every turn is living in a fantasy world.