Byron York’s Daily Memo: Trump’s final 13 days

TRUMP’S FINAL 13 DAYS. President Trump now has less than two weeks left in his term. His election challenge came to an awful climax Wednesday when his supporters stormed the Capitol while lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. The scenes of chaos, violence, disorder, and contempt for the democratic process will taint Trump’s legacy.

What does the president do now? At 3:49 a.m. Thursday, top aide Dan Scavino tweeted a statement from the president, whose own feed was blocked by Twitter. “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th,” Trump said. “I have always said we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it’s only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again!”

So Trump is now pledging an “orderly transition.” That will certainly relieve some worried Republicans and Democrats. But again, what will he actually do for the next 13 days?

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Here is a suggestion: The president can devote all his remaining time in office to speeding the vaccinations of millions of Americans in the coronavirus pandemic. Trump did admirable work in creating Operation Warp Speed, which led to the production of vaccines in record time — something his critics did not believe was possible. Trump succeeded by prodding and pushing and paying pharmaceutical companies to work with unprecedented swiftness.

Now, though, the process of actually vaccinating Americans has bogged down in the states, especially those states with incompetent (or worse) leaders like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Initially, U.S. officials predicted that as many as 20 million Americans would be fully vaccinated before the end of 2020,” National Public Radio wrote recently. “And while that many vaccine doses were distributed, only a fraction of them have been administered.”

In New York City, according to the New York Post, “the city’s Health and Hospitals Network has used just 31 percent” of its allotted vaccine. “It’s chaos out there,” one county executive told the paper. “The state has no idea what it’s doing.” California’s distribution of the vaccine has been slowed by layers of bureaucracy. Nationally, according to the Associated Press: “As of Wednesday, more than three weeks into the U.S. vaccination campaign, 5.3 million people had gotten the first shot out of the 17 million doses distributed so far.”

It’s a situation begging for presidential leadership. Trump could spend the next two weeks applying the same pressure to state and local officials that he applied to vaccine researchers and makers during Operation Warp Speed. Is there anything more valuable a president could do in his last days in office?

Of course, Trump should have been doing it for the last month. Instead, he pursued his election challenges long past the time they should have ended, on December 14 when the Electoral College tallied its results and the Supreme Court denied the election case filed by the state of Texas. Trump’s pursuit ended disastrously at the Capitol on Wednesday.

None of that can be changed. But the nation still faces an uneasy 13 days as Trump finishes his term. The president could make that a productive, rather than a destructive, time by focusing on the vaccine. It won’t undo the damage he has done to his own legacy in the past month. But it would be enormously helpful at a time when there is finally a chance to get the raging virus under control. In his early-morning statement, Trump said that while his term is ending, he is only beginning the fight to make America great again. Finding focus in his final days would be a useful way to start.