One lesson of Biden’s winning presidential campaign, they say, is that there’s little incentive to engage with Trump, and that his penchant for spectacle is wearing thin with the American people. The tension will reach a head on Jan. 6, when Congress formally ratifies Biden’s victory as Trump’s supporters wage protests both on the streets of Washington, egged on by the president, and within the House and Senate.

Biden has been “adamant that we were not going to get down in the gutter with Donald Trump every day,” said adviser Kate Bedingfield. “That’s not who he is, and that’s not what the American people want to see in a president.”…

“This is unprecedented territory,” said Steve Israel, a former eight-term Democratic congressman from New York and director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University. “We’ve never had a former president who is dedicated to the proposition of the failure of his successor.”

Biden’s team regards Trump’s attempts to overturn the will of voters — including his effort to recruit Republican lawmakers to challenge congressional certification of the election results on Wednesday — as doing more harm to the outgoing president’s legacy than to Biden.