Magazine
TRUMPOLOGY
Trump’s Battle to Win the First 100 Days
The former president has been on an increasingly manic
crusade to knock his successor and buff his own battered legacy.
“In some respects, Donald Trump gains strength by
being marginalized, by being underestimated. That’s what gets him up in the
morning. That’s what gets his heartbeat going. He is going to fight every
battle and ultimately lose every war. That’s just the nature of who he is. And
it’s going to happen again in his post-presidency. It’s the one thing you can count
on with Donald Trump. He can’t let anything go. He’s going to fight everything
to the fullest extent that he’s able. And ultimately he’s going to lose.”
Illustrations
by Barry Blitt
By MICHAEL
KRUSE
04/29/2021
04:30 AM EDT
Michael
Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/29/donald-trump-100-days-484926
There’s not
just one 100-day clock that’s reached its peak this week—there are two.
First, of
course, is Joe Biden’s—the collective assessment of what he’s said and done
since his inauguration as the 46th president on January 20.
Then,
though, there is Trump’s—the 45th president’s first 100 days as the antipope of
Mar-a-Lago. On full display has been his guiding, lifelong, zero-sum belief:
For there to be a winner, there must also be a loser—and if Biden is the one,
then Trump is the other. And as this arbitrary but important and traditional
mile-marker has gotten closer and closer—as Biden’s ambitious agenda has continued
to elicit higher favorability ratings and polling numbers and early comparisons
to some of history’s most effective presidents—Trump’s agitation has gotten
only more palpable and pronounced.
From the
Florida perch he has turned into the unofficial capital of the GOP and the most
important address in American politics not in Washington, D.C., Trump’s
delivered a crescendoing, double-barreled barrage from his Save America PAC and
his post-presidential office in Palm Beach. The statements bear his telltale
mix of strange punctuation and catchphrases along with an equally
characteristic clamoring for credit and angling for attention by attacking the
man who beat him last fall.
“We will
WIN, and we will WIN BIG!”
“Our
country is being destroyed by the Democrats!”
“Except for
massive voter fraud, this was a campaign that was easily won by your favorite
Republican President, me!”
Trump has
hosted at his private club some of the most powerful Republicans plus a spate
of aspiring elected officials vying for his approval. He’s deployed his emailed
blasts to zero in on targets for vengeance while offering up to loyalists
across the country his imprimatur. He’s welcomed well-heeled would-be donors.
And it’s
not just what he’s doing—it’s what he’s not. He’s not working on a memoir, and
he’s not putting into motion a presidential library, after-the-Oval activities
that are nothing if not conventional but also acknowledgements of a change in
status—to more was than is. Trump, on the other hand, isn’t acting like a
has-been—he’s acting like a still-here. Indeed, ramping up of late the volume
and frenzy of his declarations, he is trying not only to not fade like any
other former leader of the free world but to stoke his considerable remaining
political sway—his first 100 days out of office a brazen continuation of his
lack of a concession in the wake of his defeat.
“Trump is
an autobot of predictable behaviors,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me.
“He’s moving through his post-presidential days so far the way he’s moved
through everything in his life.”
“He was an
angry insurgent when he campaigned for the presidency. He was an angry
insurgent as president. And as a former president, he continues to be an angry
insurgent,” presidential historian Mark Updegrove told me.
No sentient
soul, obviously, expected Trump to quietly recede from the scene.
In the
course of my reporting during his waning days in the White House, people
predicted “something remarkably new,” “a post-presidency like we’ve never
seen,” and a “shadow ex-president.” At times, though, Trump hasn’t been as
constant and as omnipresent as many were expecting. Without the use of Air
Force One, and his signature 757, too, he’s mostly stayed put, making limited
public appearances, staging not a single rally, traveling almost not at all.
He’s plainly been hampered by his bans from Facebook and Twitter. He’s at odds
with some key leaders of the party he seeks to control. He’s also been stymied,
it’s often seemed, by a disciplined successor determined to pay him next to no
heed. Even so, Trump stands, stubbornly and sneeringly, as the GOP’s preeminent
persona and donor draw. “All Republican roads,” as senior adviser Jason Miller
put it this month, “lead to Mar-a-Lago.”
“It’s
really amazing to me that a one-term president can be the kingmaker in a
political party,” Slater Bayliss, a Tallahassee-based Republican strategist who
describes himself as “no fan” of Trump, told me.
“I’m in
awe,” said Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist and another Trump critic. “I
don’t know of any other candidate—any loser—who could have done this.”
“It’s just
been really skillful the way that he has pulled this off. I mean, I tip my hat
to the guy,” Bayliss said. “Other one-term presidents … they were done.”
Far from
done, Trump’s activity is mounting markedly, as if he’s aware of this looming
deadline. Over the past couple of weeks, he’s said more and more about more and
more, sat for his first on-camera, hourlong interview and increasingly strayed
from the squarely political to fire at fecund, culture-war cracks, lambasting
LeBron James and even the Academy Awards.
Lurking,
though, in Trump’s spiking Florida fever chart, in his intensifying efforts to
reestablish himself, to re-insert himself, to reemphasize what he sees as his
record of achievement, is an implicit recognition. That his legacy is
uncertain. That the scope of his ongoing influence is an open question.
Those close
to him scoff. “Let me tell you something,” said a former senior administration
official who recently met with Trump in his office above the ballroom at
Mar-a-Lago. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Trump was
tired.
“He was
exhausted,” the former senior administration official said of the immediate
aftermath of his tenure as president. “And he just did something he hadn’t done
in five years. He just relaxed.”
People
who’ve watched him closely over the years and even for decades? They noticed.
And they were, they told me, surprised. “Quieter than I would have expected,”
Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio said. “A slower pace than I had
anticipated,” presidential historian Doug Brinkley said.
There were,
of course, reasons beyond mere overwork. In his last few months in office,
Trump fanned the flames of the toxic fiction that November’s election was
illegitimate and therefore so, too, was his loss. Supporters of his stormed the
Capitol, wanting to reverse the results, leaving five dead. He was impeached
for a second time. All of this was in addition to Trump’s already pending legal
peril. Regardless of the cause, however, he got off to a sluggish, almost
subdued start as a former president, lying low (for him) for weeks after Air
Force One dropped him off at PBI.
In January,
near the end of the month, he “opened the Office of the Former President,”
according to a “Statement from the Office of the Former President.” It was the
first time he used in that context that word—“former.” Notably, it also was the
last. Thereafter, he did away with the moniker evocative of the past and
shifted to the number that will always be his—“Donald J. Trump, 45th President
of the United States of America.” Trump loves comebacks. Former’s for losers.
Beyond practically
obligatory, mostly pro forma communications concerning the impeachment
proceedings and the trial in the Senate, at the end of which he again was
acquitted, Trump endorsed former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee
Sanders in her Arkansas gubernatorial bid, highlighted numbers from a friendly
pollster saying House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming was
“extremely vulnerable” to a primary on account of her anti-Trump impeachment
vote and crowed about his “very good and cordial” meeting with House Republican
Leader Kevin McCarthy at Mar-a-Lago. Trump took the opportunity as well to
suggest his “endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time.”
In
February? Largely similarly languid. He endorsed Kansas Senator Jerry Moran.
Ditto Max Miller, a former aide, in his Ohio congressional primary effort
against Anthony Gonzalez, another one of the 10 House GOP impeachment
dissidents. He hosted Lindsey Graham and Steve Scalise. He did a trio of
cable-news phone-ins the day of Rush Limbaugh’s death. He seemed to snap to
with a lengthy statement excoriating Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell,
calling him “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” He went to Orlando
to speak at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action
Committee. “Miss me yet?” he said. He listed the names of those who’ve crossed
him. He promised retribution. He dropped a tease. “I will be actively working
to elect strong, tough and smart Republican leaders,” he said. “We will take
back the House. We will win the Senate. And then a Republican president will
make a triumphant return to the White House—and I wonder who that will be.”
In March,
though, Trump showed more oomph—much more.
Hunkered
down at Mar-a-Lago, he rolled out endorsements—Senators Tim Scott of South
Carolina, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Mike Crapo of Idaho, John Boozman of
Montana, Jody Hice in his run for Secretary of State in Georgia against Trump
nemesis Brad Raffensperger, others including a pair of Trump-supporting state
party chairs. Never just an endorsement—“my Complete and Total Endorsement!” In
an appreciation of sorts of Roy Blunt, the retiring Missouri senator, he
introduced a new phrase—“the Impeachment Hoax #2 (IH-2).”
He blasted
Karl Rove, the former top adviser to George W. Bush. A “pompous fool,” he
called him. “If it weren’t for me,” he said in what he said about Rove, “the
House would have lost 25 seats instead of gaining 15”—adding characteristic
ranting about ratings (“31 million people listened to my CPAC speech online,
and it had among the largest television audience of the week”) and working in
some old standby epithets (“Liddle’ Bob Corker,” Jeff ‘Flakey’ Flake,” “Sleepy
Joe”).
He urged
former football star Herschel Walker to run for Senate in Georgia. He urged his
supporters to give money to him and not to other Republican coffers. “Send your
donation to Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com,” he said. “If you donate to
our Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com, you are helping the America First
movement and doing it right,” he said.
He went
back to announcing his pending appearances on TV the way he did when he was
tweeting from the residence in the White House.
“Enjoy!”
He went on
Newsmax. He went on Fox News. He talked on the podcast of a Fox News host.
He kept
calling the election rigged. “Rigged,” he said. “Illegitimate,” he said.
“Fraud,” he said. “You saw what happened, 10:30 in the evening, all of a
sudden, I said, ‘That’s a strange thing, why are they closing up certain
places, right?’” he said in an impromptu speech at a wedding he dropped in on
at his club. “It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to have you at
Mar-a-Lago. You are a great and beautiful couple.”
He sent out
a statement that read like a late-night tweet: “Where’s Durham? Is he a living,
breathing human being? Will there ever be a Durham report?” He flagged Fox
flattery from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He met with Marjorie Taylor
Greene. He castigated public health professionals Drs. Anthony Fauci and
Deborah Birx. He called them “self-promoters trying to reinvent history.” He
called Fauci “the king of ‘flip-flops’” and said he was “moving the goalposts
to make himself look as good as possible.” He called Birx “a proven liar with
very little credibility left” and “a very negative voice who didn’t have the
right answers.”
“I was the
one to get it done,” he said.
“Time has
proven me correct,” he said.
Most
importantly, though, Trump started in earnest, and in utterly unprecedented
fashion, to aim his ire at Biden—from the situation at the border with Mexico
to changes in tax plans to matters of pandemic response, endeavoring to retrain
the spotlight on his legacy while repurposing lines of criticism he once
endured as cudgels against his successor.
“Our border
is now totally out of control thanks to the disastrous leadership of Joe Biden.
… He has violated his oath of office to uphold our Constitution and enforce our
laws,” he said in a statement on March 5. “All they had to do was keep this
smooth-running system on autopilot. Instead, in the span of a just [sic] few
weeks, the Biden Administration has turned a national triumph into a national
disaster. They are in way over their heads,” he said on March 21. “Joe Biden’s
radical plan to implement the largest tax hike in American history is a massive
giveaway to China,” he said on March 31, describing it as a “classic globalist
betrayal” and a “cruel and heartless attack on the American Dream.”
In April,
the onslaught only intensified.
Along with
more endorsements of allies and call-outs of antagonists, an expression of
mourning of the passing of Prince Philip of the British royal family and the
passing along of links to pro-Trump opinion pieces in the New York Post and the
Palm Beach Daily News—“Wow, so nice!”—Trump’s missives this month got
particularly manic, beginning around Easter.
“Why is it
that every time the 2020 ELECTION FRAUD is discussed, the Fake News Media
consistently states that such charges are baseless, unfounded, unwarranted,
etc.? Sadly, there was massive fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election, and
many very angry people understand that. With each passing day, and
unfortunately for the Radical Left CRAZIES, more and more facts are coming
out,” he said the Friday of the holiday weekend. “Other than that, Happy
Easter!”
That
Saturday, he decried “WOKE CANCEL CULTURE” and then (with no apparent irony)
called for boycotts of baseball, Coke, Delta and other major companies after
Georgia passed restrictive voting laws Republicans insisted were necessary
reforms. “We will not become a Socialist Nation,” he said. “Happy Easter!”
“Happy
Easter to ALL,” Trump added on actual Easter Sunday, “including the Radical
Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our
Country!”
The next
week, donors descended on Palm Beach—“Mecca,” a top GOP operative called it
when we talked—shuttle-busing from the Four Seasons to listen to the former
president speak at Mar-a-Lago. Immediately leaked were the more incendiary snippets.
He railed at the “rigged” election. He called McConnell “a dumb son of a
bitch.” He indicated he’s bothered by Biden’s overall popularity relative to
his lack thereof. “Saintly Joe Biden,” Trump said.
It spurred
a renewed round of strikes at Biden—the type of bombardment that (maybe)
wouldn’t be out of place in the thick of the stretch of a presidential
campaign.
“The Biden
Administration did a terrible disservice to people throughout the world by
allowing the FDA and CDC to call a ‘pause’ in the use of the Johnson &
Johnson COVID-19 vaccine,” Trump said on April 13. “They didn’t like me very
much because I pushed them extremely hard,” Trump said of Pfizer. “But if I
didn’t, you wouldn’t have a vaccine for 3-5 years, or maybe not at all.”
On April
18, he commented on Biden’s stated date of September 11 to withdraw troops from
Afghanistan. Trump made it “possible,” he said. “I planned to withdraw on May
1st.”
“If Joe
Biden wants to keep our Country safe from Radical Islamic Terrorism,” he said
before his sitdown with Sean Hannity, “he should reinstitute the foreign
country Travel Ban.”
Trump’s
“nothing without Twitter,” a Florida Democratic operative told me earlier this
month, but I don’t know if that’s true. Trump’s nothing without enemies.
“He so
needs to have an enemy,” biographer Gwenda Blair told me. “If there’s not an
enemy, he turns to the shark next to him and says, ‘You’re the enemy.’”
Foes are
his fuel—it’s a lifelong through line—but Biden’s been a resolutely unwilling
combatant.
“Trump is a
person who thrives on attention and conflict,” said O’Brien, “and he must feel
like he’s wallowing in a tar pit when Biden pays him no mind.”
It’s hard
to keep hammering at somebody who simply doesn’t respond—the strategy in the
Biden White House to “never” engage with (as Biden dubbed Trump back in
February during a CNN town hall) “the former guy.”
Instead of
Biden, in the past couple weeks, Trump has targeted Cheney (“polling sooo
low”), or Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, for what Trump
considers his insufficient support for the audit of the 2020 election in the
state. LeBron James, too: The NBA superstar, Trump said, “should focus on
basketball rather than presiding over the destruction of the NBA, which has
just recorded the lowest television RATINGS …” Ratings, ratings, ratings—always
with the ratings. “What used to be called The Academy Awards, and now is called
the ‘Oscars’—a far less important and elegant name—had the lowest Television
Ratings in recorded history,” Trump said earlier this week, pivoting to the
semblance of a political point: “These television people spend all their time
thinking about how to promote the Democrat Party, which is destroying our
Country, and cancel Conservatives and Republicans.”
Past this
milepost of these “first 100 days,” Biden’s as president, Trump’s as ex-, such
statements are certain not to stop—for the rest of this year, into the midterms
in 2022 on which the congressional balance of power so precariously teeters,
then toward 2024 as Trump works to retain his GOP supremacy with the specter of
another candidacy of his own. The most important question in politics is that
of the endurance and the extent of his power.
“He has
less rhetorical power than any ex-president since William Howard Taft,” posited
rhetoric expert Jen Mercieca, citing Trump’s social-media de-platforming and
referring to Taft’s place as essentially the last pre-mass media president.
“In the
very red states, his name still means something,” former Trump attorney and
fixer Michael Cohen told me. “Everywhere else? Irrelevant.”
Perhaps.
But irrelevant is a very relative term when there are 74 million people out
there who voted for him.
“The
Republicans are just letting him get away with it,” former Trump Organization
executive Barbara Res told me. “I thought, after he left, they would say, ‘OK,
good riddance.’”
“He’ll
never wither away,” said Updegrove, the presidential historian. “In some
respects, Donald Trump gains strength by being marginalized, by being
underestimated. That’s what gets him up in the morning. That’s what gets his
heartbeat going. He is going to fight every battle and ultimately lose every
war. That’s just the nature of who he is. And it’s going to happen again in his
post-presidency. It’s the one thing you can count on with Donald Trump. He
can’t let anything go. He’s going to fight everything to the fullest extent
that he’s able. And ultimately he’s going to lose.”
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