Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — President Trump has finally ended his active obstruction of the transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden, but he continues to claim the election was stolen from him. Meanwhile, Biden has promptly named his first cabinet and other agency officials, demonstrating his determination to move on toward his January 20 inauguration.

Trump gave up his obstruction of the transition process ungraciously, as his lawyers’ multiple efforts to prove illegalities in vote-counting crumbled in several key state courts and as several Republican senators, weary of his embarrassing foot-dragging, began to desert his cause, raising questions about his continued hold on the party he captured in the 2016 election.

Emily Murphy, the Trump-appointed official who runs the General Services Administration, which oversees federal funds for impending transitions, suddenly announced on Monday they were being released, also permitting Biden officials to confer with outgoing officials dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. It was a rebuke to Trump, who made no mention of it.

Biden, who until then had patiently ignored Trump’s petulant behavior, on Monday moved forward on his own, choosing his longtime top foreign policy adviser, Tony Blinken, as his secretary of state. Blinken held the posts of Deputy Secretary of State, Deputy National Security Adviser and National Security Adviser to the Vice President during the Obama-Biden administration, and before that was staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Biden.

Often in the past, the post, considered the top cabinet position, went to a high-profile political figure. Biden’s choice suggests that he intends to have a career professional in it with whom he also has had a close working relationship, facilitating Biden’s own continued major personal involvement in foreign policy.

The president-elect has also said he intends to have a cabinet and administration that looks more like America. To that end, he named as his secretary of homeland security Cuba-born Alejandro Mayorkas, himself the child of refugee immigrants, who in the Obama years oversaw the protection of undocumented immigrants and their children.

The highest-profile appointment went to former Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, to a seat on the National Security Council with particular focus on climate change, one of his prime interests, signaling Biden’s own elevated involvement in it.

He also chose Avril Haines, a veteran intelligence officer, to be the first woman director of national intelligence, overseeing the CIA and other spy agencies. He was reportedly set to name another prominent woman, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, as his treasury secretary, in what will be a pointed contrast to the top Trump roster.

As for Trump, desperately clinging to his last weeks in the Oval Office, speculation already includes talk of a political comeback and second presidential campaign in 2024, relying on the more than 73 million voters who cast ballots for him this month.

The handful of GOP senators, including Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and retiring Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, may be the forerunners of others developing a stiff backbone to Trump’s entreaties in the time between and the 2024 election. In the meantime, judging from his current determination to remain the driving force of a party bloodied but unbowed by his recent rejection, Trump will continue to be at the center of its struggle for relevance in the four years ahead.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.