Trump's monumental sulk: president retreats from
public eye as Covid ravages US
Two weeks after his defeat, Trump has gone from always
present to effectively missing, behavior that many say is unprecedented and
dangerous
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sat 21 Nov
2020 08.00 GMTLast modified on Sat 21 Nov 2020 12.13 GMT
There was
one thing that even Donald Trump’s harshest critics were never able to accuse
him of: invisibility.
The outgoing
US president held endless campaign rallies, verbally sparred with reporters on
the way to his helicopter and spent so long on the phone to Fox News shows that
even pliable hosts had to gently but firmly hang up. He was the master of
saturating every news cycle with his voice and image.
Yet two
weeks after his defeat by Joe Biden in the election, Trump has effectively gone
missing in action. Day after day passes without a public sighting. He does not
hold press conferences any more. He has even stopped calling into conservative
media.
For
critics, it is evidence of a monumental sulk as Trump contemplates his imminent
loss of power and exit from the White House. In their view, it is also a
staggering abrogation of responsibility as the coronavirus pandemic surges to
new highs, infecting more than 158,000 Americans – and killing in excess of
1,100 – every day.
Amid the
deafening silence, Trump’s only “proof of life” since Biden’s victory has been
a handful of public events at the White House and a military cemetery, weekend
outings to his golf course in Virginia and a barrage of tweets airing
grievances and pushing baseless conspiracy theories that the election was
stolen from him.
“I don’t
think we’ve had a president since Richard Nixon who is as far in the bunker and
detached from the country as Donald Trump is right now,” said Larry Jacobs,
director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the
University of Minnesota.
“Donald
Trump has not only suffered a catastrophic political defeat, he’s clearly also
suffering from a deep emotional break. This behavior is even more erratic than
usual and he has retreated. He has put himself in a form of psychological
isolation. His emotional state is clearly abysmal. In the popular lexicon, he’s
lost it.”
Trump’s
hermit-like status has proved irresistible to comedians, historians and
overseas commentators. He has been compared to a tyrant in a fragile democracy
holed up in a presidential palace and plotting either an internal coup or a
sudden escape across the border. Late-night TV host Stephen Colbert observed:
“Well, history famously holds happy endings for autocrats who lose and then
retreat to their bunker.”
Michael
Beschloss, a presidential historian, has used Twitter to post images of Howard
Hughes, a billionaire who spent his last years sequestered in darkened hotel
rooms, and Norma Desmond, an aging Hollywood star in the film Sunset Boulevard,
noting that she “spent hour after hour in the dark, watching movies of herself
in the glory days, before her decline and fall”.
Beschloss
also put out an entire series of tweets citing Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s
classic movie about a media tycoon whose political ambitions collapse in
scandal. In one picture, Kane’s newspaper carries the front page headline:
“Fraud At Polls!” In another, Kane is trashing a room at Xanadu, his luxury
estate in south Florida. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate also happens to be in south
Florida.
But on a
more serious note Beschloss, author of books such as Presidents of War and
Presidential Courage, this week posed a question: “When before in history have
we seen a president of the United States disappear from public view like this?”
Trump
reportedly spends mornings in the White House residence bingeing on television.
Then he goes down to the Oval Office in the afternoon, moving between it and an
adjoining dining room which has a big TV. He broods there until night,
conferring with lawyers in increasingly desperate efforts to overturn the
election even as Biden nears a record 80m votes.
Yet the
reclusive president has not been entirely idle. He fired his defense secretary
and top election cybersecurity official, announced a drawdown of troops in
Afghanistan and Iraq and even reportedly discussed a potential military strike
against Iran.
Kayleigh
McEnany, the White House press secretary, told Fox News without apparent irony:
“The president’s hard at work – he’s hard at work on Covid, among other issues,
drawing down our number of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing our men and
women home.”
The
coronavirus has scythed through the country in recent weeks with rising case
numbers and hospitalizations and a world record death toll of a quarter of a
million. Trump, however, went on holding election campaign rallies, derided
infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci and empowered adviser Scott Atlas, an
outspoken critic of science-based public health measures.
Jacobs
commented: “Here’s the captain of the ship who’s missing, and the ship is
really listing badly to the side, taking on water as more and more people are
getting ill and dying. The president is not only missing from his post, but
he’s encouraging a mutiny. There’s no precedent in American history for this
kind of deranged behaviour.”
Ronald
Brownstein, a senior political analyst for CNN, tweeted on Thursday: “1,869
deaths in a day, heading into Thanksgiving. And the president, without a peep
of complaint from his party, has gone AWOL, abandoning his responsibility to
protect the country & leaving those in his charge to fend for themselves.
What would happen to any military commander?”
For many
observers, Trump’s retreat is the primal instinct of a sore loser. Biographers
have told how he was raised by his father to be a “killer” and regard losing as
a sign of unforgivable weakness. The family attended a church whose pastor,
Norman Vincent Peale, wrote the bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking with
advice to “stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as
succeeding”.
Trump
cannot bear going out in defeat so is “24/7 focussed” on reframing himself as a
victim before a potential comeback in 2024, suggested Gwenda Blair, author of
The Trumps. “It’s that sort of amped up Norman Vincent Peale power of positive
thinking: hold on to an image of yourself as successful, never let it go. He’s
not only done that but absolutely weaponized it his whole life. In his mind,
he’s never failed at anything and why should he start now?”
“He always
had dad to bail him out before and his ability to bend reality has been validated
for him over and over and over. He survived six corporate bankruptcies, two
divorces, and each time he bent reality so that he could make a claim that a
lot of people accepted that he was a success. The most successful unsuccessful
guy ever.”
This time
the result for America is a sense of whiplash: from all Trump all the time to a
president conspicuous by his absence, denying reality even as a stand is
erected in front of the White House for spectators to view Biden’s inaugural
parade. His obstruction of an orderly transition could hamper the pandemic
response, jeopardize national security and cause lasting damage to democracy.
Michael
Steele, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project and former
chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “It’s Trump being a little
petulant boy who didn’t get his way and is not getting his way, so he doesn’t
want to be out in public and he doesn’t want to play any more. He wants to take
his toys and go hide somewhere or create mischief some other way.”
Trump’s
recent military shake up was an attempt to distract attention from the cold
truth of his defeat, Steele added. “He doesn’t want to be reminded of that.
He’ll want to act and sound as if he’s in charge. Well, he isn’t. He’s the
lamest of lame ducks and at this point as a country we just need to get a grip
and recognize that, as other organs inside our government are trying to do, and
move on.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário