At least Joe Biden doesn’t have to get to Washington on a horse.
As President Donald Trump is already showing, the two-and-a-half months between a US election and the January inauguration of a new president offers plenty of time for mischief: Trump has already dumped his defense secretary for “disloyalty.” The heads of the CIA and the FBI could go next in his revenge spree, and Trump is making fantastical claims of mass voter fraud to trash US democracy and strangle Biden’s legitimacy.
But it could be worse. For much of US history, new presidents didn’t take the oath until March. This was partly due to tradition but also logistical: It could take days for election results to reach the extremities of the country. And in the days when four-legged transport was the quickest available, it was tough for new presidents to reach Washington through the winter snowdrifts.
The long interregnum came with costs. After winning the 1860 election, President-elect Abraham Lincoln had to watch the nation splinter, as several states seceded from the Union before the Civil War.
Change came in the 1930s, when Congress passed the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, fixing the transfer of power for noon on January 20. (In the 10 months it took for the states to ratify the move, though, Franklin Roosevelt still had to sit by and watch the Great Depression deepen under Herbert Hoover’s neglect — a wait that Biden may find familiar as the pandemic worsens.)
In most countries, the transfer of power is far more abrupt.The UK kicks prime ministers out of 10 Downing Street the morning after their defeat. Ousted Canadian PMs get about 10 days to pack their bags. New French presidents usually have about the same time to prepare for their inaugurations.
But Biden is stuck. He can do little but observe as Trump lashes out for the next two months. The issue of how the President-elect gets to his new digs, however, is more easily solved: How else could Amtrak Joe roll into town but on a train he boarded at the Joseph R. Biden Jr. station in Wilmington, Delaware?
