On the morning of January 20, Klain might have preferred to attend in person the inaugural ceremony of the man whose political career he worked so hard to advance. But he was missing it, stuck in the building at the behest of Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
Ever since the November election, much of the Trump administration acted as if the Biden people were engaged in a hostile takeover of the government. They refused to share the most basic details that would allow the incoming administration to prepare for the monumental tasks in front of it. A pandemic was raging—and the Trump people withheld access to civil servants and government data that would have provided the Biden White House with a basic sense of the government’s vaccination program. When Biden officials asked Trump’s trade negotiator for details about the state of conversations with China, he refused. Trump appointees at the Office of Management and Budget broke with generations of practice and prevented civil servants from helping Biden aides prepare the budget that they were legally required to submit to Congress in February.
After all that petty obstruction, Meadows’s invitation to meet felt like an act of comity that shouldn’t be shirked.
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