MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
...
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.”
VIENNA — Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was experienced by many right-wing populists in Europe as a momentous turning point. It was their version of 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall made liberalism appear unstoppable and triumphant. Right-wing populists from Hungary to Britain believed that if Mr. Trump could become president of the United States, the future belonged to them. President Trump’s 2020 defeat may trigger the rise of a much darker vision.
Fortified by the solidarity of a majority of Republicans, including, it seems, the secretary of state, Mr. Trump has wantonly rejected the outcome of the recent vote. Invoking allegations of fraud, he has made it clear that for him, conceding defeat is a non-starter. This behavior might seem pathetic — and it’s not going to keep him in office — but his decision to ignore the will of the people has ramifications for democracy well beyond the United States.
While most presidents and prime ministers seem ready to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden, a handful of political leaders — Mr. Trump’s allies — are endorsing his defiant gambit. When the media announced Mr. Biden’s triumph last Saturday, right-wing broadcasters across Europe insisted that the elections were not over. While Emmanuel Macron of France and Angela Merkel of Germany seemed more than pleased to usher in a new administration, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Andrzej Duda of Poland were in no rush to congratulate the president-elect.
In fact, at the same time Mr. Trump was calling foul, Mr. Orban was proposing changes to the Hungarian electoral system that should help him to stay in power beyond 2022 and threatened to veto the European Union budget if Berlin and Brussels demanded that rule of law violations lead to the suspension of European funds. By doing it he had made it clear that the outcome of the American elections will not change his policies and that, like Mr. Trump, his choice is defiance. He is ready to block the much needed European Recovery Fund in order to demonstrate that he will not compromise with Brussels.
Similar threads
