WHITE HOUSE
MEMO
Trump’s Final Days of Rage and Denial
The last act of the Trump presidency has taken on the
stormy elements of a drama more common to history or literature than a modern
White House.
By Peter
Baker
Dec. 5,
2020
Updated
6:11 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— Over the past week, President Trump posted or reposted more than 130 messages
on Twitter lashing out at the results of an election he lost. He mentioned the
coronavirus pandemic now reaching its darkest hours four times — and even then
just to assert that he was right about the outbreak and the experts were wrong.
Moody and
by accounts of his advisers sometimes depressed, the president barely shows up
to work, ignoring the health and economic crises afflicting the nation and
largely clearing his public schedule of meetings unrelated to his desperate bid
to rewrite the election results. He has fixated on rewarding friends, purging
the disloyal and punishing a growing list of perceived enemies that now
includes Republican governors, his own attorney general and even Fox News.
The final
days of the Trump presidency have taken on the stormy elements of a drama more
common to history or literature than a modern White House. His rage and
detached-from-reality refusal to concede defeat evoke images of a besieged
overlord in some distant dictatorship defiantly clinging to power rather than
going into exile or an erratic English monarch imposing his version of reality
on his cowed court.
And while
he will leave office in 46 days, the last few weeks may only foreshadow what he
will be like after he departs. Mr. Trump will almost certainly try to shape the
national conversation from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his relentless
campaign to discredit the election could undercut his successor,
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. Although many Republicans would like to
move on, he appears intent on forcing them to remain in thrall to his need for
vindication and vilification even after his term expires.
On Saturday
night, Mr. Trump planned to take his unreality show to Georgia for his first
major public appearance since the Nov. 3 election. A rally meant to support two
Republican senators in the runoff next month offered a high-profile opportunity
to vent his grievances and promote his false claims that he was somehow cheated
of a second term by a vast conspiracy that he imagines involved Venezuela,
Republican officials and his own Justice Department.
At times,
Mr. Trump’s railing-against-his-fate outbursts seem like a story straight out
of William Shakespeare, part tragedy, part farce, full of sound and fury. Is
Mr. Trump a modern-day Julius Caesar, forsaken by even some of his closest
courtiers? (Et tu, Bill Barr?) Or a King Richard III who wars with the nobility
until being toppled by Henry VII? Or King Lear, railing against those who do
not love and appreciate him sufficiently? How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it
is to have a thankless electorate.
“This is classic Act V behavior,” said Jeffrey R.
Wilson, a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard who published the book “Shakespeare
and Trump” this year. “The forces are being picked off and the tyrant is holed
up in his castle and he’s growing increasingly anxious and he feels insecure
and he starts blustering about his legitimate sovereignty and he starts
accusing the opposition of treason.”
Others hear
echoes from the East, recalling autocrats in the far reaches of the former
Soviet Union barricading themselves in presidential palaces while furiously
spinning out enemies-of-the-people propaganda to justify holding onto power
after popular uprisings.
Alina
Polyakova, the president of the Center for European Policy Analysis and a
Russia scholar, said Mr. Trump reminded her of President Vladimir V. Putin, who
has largely withdrawn from view recently amid public discontent in the late
stages of an aging regime.
“Both also
seem to be living in alternate realities surrounded only by those who confirm
those realities,” she said. “But whereas one brooder will weather a slow and
long decline, the other is increasingly facing a rapid decline and scrambling
to do what he can to save his family and loyalists — and of course himself.”
Students of
the American presidency, on the other hand, could think of no recent parallel.
“As we move toward Inauguration Day, I have thought almost daily of a remark
attributed to Henry Adams: ‘I expected the worst, and it was worse than I
expected,’” said Patricia O’Toole, a biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson as well as Adams.
Unlike any
of his modern predecessors, Mr. Trump has not called his victorious opponent,
much less invited him to the White House for the traditional postelection
visit. Mr. Trump has indicated that he may not attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration,
which would make him the first sitting president since 1869 to refuse to
participate in the most important ritual of the peaceful transfer of power.
He has been
enabled by Republican leaders unwilling to stand up to him, even if many
privately wish he would go away sooner rather than later. After being called
“profiles in cowardice” by an ally of the president, 75 Republican state
legislators from Pennsylvania on Friday disavowed their own election and called
on Congress to reject the state’s electors for Mr. Biden. Only 25 of 249
Republican members of Congress surveyed by The Washington Post publicly
acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory.
“He really
has paid attention to the base,” said Christopher Ruddy, a friend of the
president’s and chief executive of Newsmax, part of the conservative news media
megaphone that has supported and amplified Mr. Trump’s allegations. “They got
him elected and in his mind got him elected the second time. And they’re
strongly in favor of this recount effort and they want him to continue this. In
his mind, he’s not just doing this for himself he’s doing it for his supporters
and for the country. He’s on a mission and he’s not going to be easily swayed.”
Mr. Trump’s
Twitter feed is a fire hose of denial. “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION,” he wrote
at one point in recent days. “We won Michigan by a lot!” he wrote at another of
a state he lost by more than 154,000 votes. He reposted a message seeking to
delegitimize Mr. Biden: “If he is inaugurated under these circumstances, he
cannot be considered ‘president’ but instead referred to as the
#presidentialoccupant.”
And he has
turned on his own party, angry that Republican leaders have refused to accept
his baseless claims and overturn the will of the voters. He referred to Gov.
Brian Kemp of Georgia, once a favorite ally, as “the hapless Governor of
Georgia.” and the “‘Republican’ Governor of Georgia” using his quotation marks
ironically, and pressed Mr. Kemp on Saturday to convene a special session of
the state legislature in a bid to overturn the results there. Gov. Doug Ducey
of Arizona, another Republican stalwart, has joined the target list. Mr. Trump
tweeted that he and Mr. Kemp “fight harder against us than do the Radical Left
Dems.”
In a
rambling 46-minute rant transmitted from the White House to the outside world
by videotape this past week, Mr. Trump denounced “corrupt forces” stealing the
election and insisted it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost.
If only everyone would accept his unfounded claims, he said, then “I very
easily win in all states.”
“Many
people in the media — and even judges — so far have refused to accept it,” Mr.
Trump said, more as accusation than concession. “They know it’s true. They know
it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say you’re
right. Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’ ”
But even as
the president desperately demands that somebody, anybody, tell him that he is
right, no one in a position of authority has done so other than blood
relatives, paid lawyers and partisan soul mates. The election has been
certified and accepted not just by Democrats but also by key Republican
governors, secretaries of state, election officials, city clerks, judges and
even Trump administration officials.
After his
own cybersecurity czar endorsed the integrity of the election, Mr. Trump fired
him. Now that Attorney General William P. Barr has said he saw no fraud that
would overturn the results, he may be next.
Mr. Trump’s
video was so out of touch with the facts that both Facebook and Twitter
appended warning notices lest viewers actually believe what the president of
the United States was telling them. Which explains why the only topic other
than the election to draw Mr. Trump’s interest over the last week was the
annual defense bill that he vowed to veto because Congress did not strip legal
protection for big technology companies as he has demanded.
The subject
that seemed of no particular interest to the president was the coronavirus now
ravaging the country he leads worse than ever. Rather than “rounding the
corner,” as Mr. Trump insisted before the election, the pandemic this past week
began killing a record high of nearly 3,000 people in the United States every
day, almost the equivalent of another Sept. 11, 2001, attack every 24 hours.
Mr. Trump
made no comment on that in his Twitter rants nor about the latest jobs report
documenting the economic toll, taking no leadership role in the middle of
America’s deadliest crisis in generations. The only four tweets he did post
mentioning the virus were more about defending his own handling of it, including
reposted messages asserting that “The president was RIGHT.”
As the
circle around Mr. Trump shrinks and even allies like Mr. Barr distance
themselves, the president resists any suggestion that he stand down. “I’m
never, ever going to concede,” he told one ally who urged him to prepare to do
so. And if he is not listening to advisers, many are no longer listening to
him.
At one
point, Mr. Trump appeared to call Mr. Ducey even as he was certifying Arizona’s
results on television and the governor refused to take the president’s call,
which was announced by a “Hail to the Chief” ring tone.
Top
Republican lawyers have dropped off his election lawsuits, which have been
dismissed by the dozens and even in one case declared “bizarre,” by a judge
appointed by Mr. Trump. Five courts in five battleground states rejected his
latest legal challenges to the election in a little more than three hours on
Friday, with a Wisconsin judge warning that “this is a dangerous path we are
being asked to tread.”
Sliding further
away from the mainstream, the president has aligned himself more clearly with
fringe news outlets like One America News Network and the conspiracy theorists
of QAnon, who believe the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping
pedophiles plotting against Mr. Trump. In a meeting with Republican senators,
according to an official confirming a report in The Post, Mr. Trump said QAnon
followers “basically believe in good government,” a comment that left the room
silent until his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, volunteered that he had never
heard them described that way.
With more
than six weeks until he leaves office, Mr. Trump remains as unpredictable and
erratic as ever. He may fire Mr. Barr or others or issue a raft of pardons to
protect himself and his allies or incite a confrontation overseas. Like King
Lear, he may fly into further rages and find new targets for his wrath.
“If there
are these analogies between classic literature and society as it’s operating
right now, then that should give us some big cause for concern this December,”
said Mr. Wilson, the Shakespearean scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the
play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”
Peter Baker
is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents
for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of six books, most
recently "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker
III." @peterbakernyt • Facebook
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