A President Unhappy, Unleashed and Unpredictable
President Trump remains the most powerful man in the
world, but powerless to achieve what he most wants: to avoid leaving office as
a loser.
Maggie Haberman Michael S. Schmidt
By Maggie
Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt
Dec. 23,
2020, 11:11 a.m. ET
With four
weeks left in President Trump’s term, he is at perhaps his most unleashed —
and, as events of the last few days have demonstrated, at the most
unpredictable point in his presidency.
He remains
the most powerful person in the world, yet he is focused on the one area in
which he is powerless to get what he wants: a way to avoid leaving office as a
loser.
He spends
his days flailing for any hope, if not of actually reversing the outcome of the
election then at least of building a coherent case that he was robbed of a
second term.
When he has
emerged from his relative isolation in recent days, it has been to suggest out
of the blue that he would try to blow up the bipartisan stimulus package,
driving a wedge through his party in the process, and to grant clemency to a
raft of allies and supporters, mostly outside the normal Justice Department
process.
He has
otherwise sequestered himself in the White House, playing host to a cast of
conspiracy theorists and hard-core supporters who traffic in ideas like
challenging the election’s outcome in Congress and even invoking martial law,
seeking to give some of them government jobs.
He is
almost entirely disengaged from leading the nation even as Americans are being
felled by the coronavirus at record rates. Faced with an aggressive
cyberassault almost surely carried out by Russia, his response, to the degree
that he has had one, has been to downplay the damage and to contradict his own
top officials by suggesting that the culprit might actually have been China. He
played almost no role in negotiating the stimulus bill that just passed
Congress before working to disrupt it at the last minute.
It is not
clear that Mr. Trump’s latest behavior is anything other than a temper tantrum,
attention-seeking or a form of therapy for the man who controls a nuclear
arsenal — though one alternative, if charitable, view is that it is strategic
groundwork for a grievance-filled run in 2024.
If nothing
else, it will make for an especially anxious next 27 days in Washington.
This
article is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former
administration officials, Republicans and allies of the president.
Most of his
advisers believe Mr. Trump will depart the White House for a final time by Jan.
20. The pardons he announced Tuesday night suggest he is comfortable using his
powers aggressively until then. But how far he will go to subvert the election
results, actually refuse to leave the White House or to unleash a wave of
unilateral policy decisions in his final weeks is hard to discern.
Still, his
erratic behavior and detachment from his duties have even some of his most
loyal aides and advisers deeply concerned.
For the
moment, Mr. Trump has told advisers he’s willing to stop listening to Sidney
Powell, the lawyer who has appealed to him by peddling a conspiracy theory
about the election, and people like Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive
of Overstock.com, who was present for a wild, nearly five-hour meeting in the
Oval Office and then the presidential residence last Friday.
But current
advisers have described a daily struggle to keep Mr. Trump from giving in to
his impulse to listen to those who are telling him what he wants to hear. And
former advisers say the most worrisome issue is the gradual disappearance of
the core group of West Wing aides who, often working in unison, consistently
could get him to turn away from risky, legally dubious and dangerous ideas.
“The number
of people who are telling him things he doesn’t want to hear has diminished,”
said his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, who had a very
public parting of ways with Mr. Trump and who has been vocal in objecting to
the president’s thrashing against his electoral loss.
Mr. Trump
has turned to aides like Peter Navarro, a trade adviser who has been trying to
gather evidence of election fraud to bolster his boss’s claims. And he is
listening to Republicans who insist that Vice President Mike Pence could help
sway the election during the normally routine process of ratifying the election
early next month, despite the fact that it isn’t realistically possible.
Among
Republicans on Capitol Hill, there is talk of clamping down on any of his
supporters who might try to disrupt that process, a possibility made real by
the president’s importuning of Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to gum
up the works.
Yet it is
not certain that Mr. Tuberville will carry through the president’s desires, and
even he if does, there is the possibility that Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, could step in to prevent such a move.
Mr. McConnell has already urged his caucus not to raise objections when the
results are certified, because it would force others to publicly vote against
the president.
Even in the
best of times, Mr. Trump has searched for — and required — reinforcements from
people outside the White House in support of whatever his aides will go along
with.
But in the
White House, Mr. Trump is turning on his closest of allies. He has complained
to allies that Mr. Pence, who has been mocked for unflinching loyalty over the
last four years, should be doing more to defend him. And he is angry that Mr.
McConnell has recognized Mr. Biden as the winner of the election.
This week,
Mr. Trump had an assistant send a chart featuring the timing of his endorsement
of Mr. McConnell overlaid on polling data to claim he was responsible for Mr.
McConnell winning re-election this year — a claim political professionals would
dispute — and to suggest the majority leader is ungrateful for his help.
And on
Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump tweeted a broadside against Senate leadership by
attacking Mr. McConnell and the majority whip, Senator John Thune, of South
Dakota, who had said any challenge to ratification of the election results
would go down like a “shot dog.”
At the
Justice Department, Attorney General William P. Barr’s public and emphatic
rejection on Monday of the need for special counsels to investigate election
fraud and Hunter Biden appeared intended in part to insulate his short-term
successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, from any further pressure on those fronts by the
president.
Privately,
allies who have stood by as Mr. Trump has weeded out others through loyalty
purges, and who have dismissed criticisms that the president has authoritarian
tendencies, are expressing concern about the next four weeks.
Mr. Barr,
whose last day in the job is Wednesday, has told associates he had been alarmed
by Mr. Trump’s behavior in recent weeks. Other advisers have privately said
they feel worn out and are looking forward to the end of the term.
For those
who remain, the days have been bleak endeavors during which government workers
are forced to spend time either executing the president’s demand that election
fraud be proven, or incurring his wrath.
As Axios
reported, Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel who has implored Mr. Trump
to steer clear of proposed maneuvers like having federal officials seize
control of voting machines to inspect them, has become a target of the
president’s anger.
Mr. Trump
has characterized Mr. Cipollone derisively, invoking his own mentor, the
infamously ruthless and unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn, as what a White House
counsel should aspire to be like.
The White
House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has objected to some of the president’s
desires, like appointing Ms. Powell as special counsel examining voter fraud,
but he also made a trip to Georgia on Tuesday to investigate ballot safety
measures. Mr. Meadows, a former House member, has also leaned into the effort
by his old colleagues to challenge the vote in Congress, something that might
keep the president from engaging further with Ms. Powell, but which many Republicans
consider destructive to their party.
Other
advisers have simply absented themselves at a time when the president is
particularly unsteady.
The
president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has been out of the
country for significant amounts of time since Election Day, traveling through
the Middle East for deals that burnish his own credentials. He has responded to
people seeking his help with Mr. Trump by saying that the president is his
children’s grandfather, implying there are limits to what he can do to help.
Mr. Trump
has spent his days watching television, calling Republicans in search of advice
on how to challenge the electoral outcome and urging them to defend him on
television. As always, he turns to Twitter for boosts of support and to vent
his anger. He has not gone golfing since the weather has turned colder, and is
cloistered in the White House, shuffling from the residence to the Oval Office.
Many Trump
advisers hope that his planned trip to his private club in West Palm Beach,
Fla., Mar-a-Lago, will give him a change of scenery and a change of
perspective. He is scheduled to leave on Wednesday and stay through the New
Year holiday, although some aides said he still might decide against it.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
@maggieNYT
Michael S.
Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal
investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of
President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
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