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, 12:19 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 next month’s runoff 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. Gov. Doug Ducey of
Arizona, another Republican stalwart, has joined the target list. Mr. Trump
retweeted a post saying “Gov Ducey has betrayed the people of Arizona,” adding, “TRUE!”
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.”