The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency
By Olivia Nuzzi
Donald
Trump going out with a limp seems like an oxymoron,” a senior
adviser to the president told me. In width and in word, in soaring skyscrapers
and Brioni suits and arena rallies and various euphemisms for great (yuge,
bigly), the man has been defined by and obsessed with largeness. His
presidency is ending small.
Trump is
guided by instinct on most days, but the final year of his presidency was
marked by something unusual: He wasn’t sure what to believe or what to do
anymore. At first he feared Joe Biden, then he thought he was a joke, and then
the joke was on him. By the summer, Trump understood that he could lose.
Surrounded by yes-men, he yearned, on occasion, for the truth they would not
give him. “At one point, he said, ‘Well, how are all the polls wrong?’ ” the adviser recalled. And
by Election Day, he understood that losing was inevitable. He accepted, even if
he had no plans to concede, that his presidency was over.
Nevertheless, in the residence, surrounded by senior advisers
and family, he was furious. About everything. He was angry things weren’t going
his way. He was angry Fox had called Arizona for Biden. He was angry that Biden
had gone out on TV first. Everyone was offering him different ideas about what
to say to the nation, to fight or to be measured or to say this or that,
contradicting each other as the president grew angrier and angrier, throwing up
one hand to silence people as he reviewed notes in the other. He was unhappy
with the notes. He was unhappy with everything. And then he went out and
ignored everybody who had tried to help.
“As the
day wore on, the day wore on him,” the adviser said. White House and campaign
staff whispered among themselves. “ ‘Wow, he’s so down. He knows he’s losing.’ ” But uncertainty crept back
by dawn. When he woke, the race still not called, and his mood changed. On a
phone call with the adviser, he said, “Why would I lose to Joe
Biden? What’s going on?” He launched a demand — “STOP THE COUNT!” —
on Twitter, but he didn’t understand that if the vote count were to stop on
Wednesday morning, he’d be handing Joe Biden the presidency.
The
adviser asked if he was trying to say that votes cast illegally (something that
happens rarely, despite Trump’s claims) should not be counted. “He said, ‘Yeah,
yeah. That’s what I mean.’ ” People
knew that by “stop the count,” he didn’t mean to literally stop the count, Trump
said. “No,” the adviser told him, “people think you mean stop counting. If they
stopped counting, you’d lose because you’re behind.” Oh. The president asked
the adviser what to say instead. After consulting with the campaign’s lawyers,
they settled on a message that claimed if the count was confined to legal votes
only, he’d win, which put through the presidential tweet filter came out like
this: “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” and “STOP
THE FRAUD!”
Meanwhile,
the campaign mounted half-assed legal fights in states they thought he still
had a chance to win — not because they thought it would bring them the election
but because there wasn’t much else to do but fight. The New York Times reported that the president’s son-in-law
and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said he was looking for a James Baker–type
figure. Instead, they got Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski, and Dave
Bossie. “That’s not a legal team,” one of the president’s friends told me.
“It’s all so bizarre.”
This
person, who speaks to the president often — or, more accurately, who listens
and says uh-huh as the president speaks — said that Trump is
not just done for, but done. “He wants to lose. He’s out of money. He worries
about being arrested. He worried about being assassinated,” they said. “It
hasn’t been a great experience for him. He likes showing people around the
White House, but the actual day-to-day business of being president? It’s been
pretty unpleasant for him.”
Everyone
processes loss in their own way.
“A lot of
what Trump says is the opposite of what he means. That’s true of all of us, to
some extent,” the president’s friend said. But when Trump said he didn’t mind
losing to Biden, even though he famously hates losers of any ilk, his friend
believed him. “He doesn’t believe losing is shameful — quitting is bad. Losing
isn’t,” this person said. “He’s afraid. He’s the most insecure, afraid person
ever. He’s too afraid to be president. He’s afraid to exercise power. He’s
afraid to do the job. It’s why he’s overbearing and crazy — he sabotages
himself constantly because he hates himself and wants out. He’s always trying
to hurt himself. That guy commits more self-harm than anyone I’ve ever
encountered.”
Former
Trump adviser Sam Nunberg didn’t buy that Trump could ever be okay with losing,
but he figured he’d find a way to cope. After all, the plan in 2015, before
Trump formally announced his candidacy, had been to drop out of the race and
return to The Apprentice claiming that he could’ve won if he’d
wanted to (NBC inadvertently kept him on the campaign trail when they severed
its relationship with him over his anti-immigrant comments). That’s not so
different from how Trump is preparing to spin his real loss now. “In general,
he hates losing. In general, is he gonna be happy? Do you think this is what he
wants, to sit here as Joe Biden gives his acceptance speech? Absolutely not,”
Nunberg said, “He lost to an idiot, and he’ll believe this whole thing was
rigged and stolen.” The senior adviser said Trump’s talked about a plan to move
to Mar-a-Lago full time instead of returning to Trump Tower.
In the
weeks leading up to the election, certain White House officials and people
close to the president were busy laying the groundwork for a post-Trump
reputational and relationship recovery tour. Trump may be holding rallies and
refusing to admit Biden is a legitimately elected president on prime-time Trump
TV, but the anti-professional class of operators who assumed power on his
coattails know that they’ll have to shape-shift if they want to survive. I
received messages from multiple staffers who said they were counting down the
days until freedom from the environment they entered, and stayed in, willingly.
That they had so much to tell me now that it was too late to matter very much.
That they were not the same as the others around them, the people who didn’t
see the place, the presidency, for what it really was.
Others
didn’t feel they had anything to explain or defend. “Don’t cry because it’s
over. Smile because it happened,” a former White House official told me. “Live.
Laugh. Love.” This person added, “Sometimes you own the libs; sometimes the
libs own you.”
*This
article appears in the November 9, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
