Journalist Garrett Graff on Fresh Air yesterday:

GROSS: Let’s start with a couple of the – what you consider most norm-breaking things President Trump has done so far to interfere with the transfer of power.

GRAFF: The biggest one has to just be the simple fact that he has not yet accepted the projected winner of the election being Joe Biden. This is a very different situation than we faced in 2000 with the Florida recount. The state victories across the country are definitive. They are decisive. And Joe Biden looks like he’s actually on his way to a comfortable victory in the Electoral College. And the fact that now, more than a week after the election, Donald Trump has not yet accepted that – he’s not yet given permission for Republican leaders to accept that and not yet given permission for the U.S. government to accept that – is deeply worrisome. There’s a second level of his norm-breaking that we are already beginning to see, which is one of the things that I had speculated about before the election, which is widespread firings of senior government officials, a housecleaning, if you will, among top national security and intelligence leaders in a way that is worrisome from the – a national security perspective amid a transition. We’ve never seen a president in a lame-duck period like this fire, for instance, the defense secretary.

And this is injecting a lot of uncertainty and instability into some very key American institutions at a moment where you are already facing uncertainty and instability amid a presidential transition.

They talk about Trump’s firing of Mark Esper, and the possibility that he did it because Esper said it was illegal and anti-democratic to use the military to quell protests the way Trump wanted to last summer. Trump may think Esper’s replacement will be willing to do what Esper rebuked Trump for wanting to do…which raises the interesting possibility of the US military protecting a full-blown coup by Trump.

GROSS: One of the things you speculate about, which may already be happening, is that President Trump can take revenge on the deep state in his lame-duck weeks. What do you mean by that?

GRAFF: Yeah. I mean, we have seen Donald Trump sort of rail against the government bureaucracy, the career civil servants in the military, in the intelligence community, across the rest of the federal government. And there are sort of two areas to be particularly concerned about in the final weeks of the Trump presidency. The first is, you know, the outright firings that he might make to try to corrupt decision-making in these final weeks, some of which we may already be seeing taking place at places like the Pentagon and the Defense Department.

The second is, basically, Donald Trump creating his own deep state opposition within the federal government. There’s a process that’s technically known in Washington jargon as burrowing in – when you have political appointees shift over into civil service roles, where people who would sort of ordinarily leave with an administration then are now sort of permanently part of the federal government. And we are beginning to see this take place in potentially some very worrisome positions.

I didn’t know they could do that. I thought civil service jobs had to be competitive.

GROSS: So the administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy – who’s a Trump appointee – she has to formally recognize Biden as the president-elect before the transfer of power can actually begin. She’s declined to do that so far. So that’s what is blocking all the transition funding. That’s what’s blocking Biden’s ability to get the presidential daily briefing. It’s what’s blocking his ability to get the funding to launch his new administration. How unprecedented is this?

GRAFF: Totally unprecedented. We’re already calling Joe Biden the president-elect, but there are really two moments where a president officially and legally becomes president-elect. And the first is when he is designated by the GSA administrator as the president-elect in a process that’s known as ascertainment, that the GSA administrator has to ascertain that he is the likely winner of the Electoral College vote and sends him a letter basically saying, Dear Joe Biden, it looks like you are going to be the next president of the United States; you are now officially the president-elect.

And as you said, that unlocks millions of dollars in transition funding for him. It unlocks government office space for his transition staff, government email addresses, government cellphones – I mean, sort of all of the information that agencies and departments have prepared for the transition. It gives his staff the legal authority to show up at agencies and departments and begin to talk with government officials. And it unlocks their ability to receive classified information, including, as you said, the president’s daily brief, the daily intelligence briefing prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In other words Trump is sabotaging everything – sabotaging in the literal sense.

GROSS: Now, I think you said that the head of the General Service Administration, Emily Murphy, is waiting for Trump to concede before she certifies Joe Biden as the president-elect. But does she legally have to wait for Trump to concede before certifying Biden?

GRAFF: Not at all. This is a decision that she alone can make at any time. She can ascertain, officially, Joe Biden as the president-elect whenever she wants, and the fact that she has not is troubling and worrisome and goes against, you know, decades of normal practice of the federal government.

Populism in action.