Stir the pot somewhere else, Trump
Washington
Many see a wannabe despot barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as words that mean nothing to him — democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful transition, constitutionality — swirl above.
One presidential historian sees something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has been tweeting pictures of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shutins and head cases.
The president and his cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months. But in other ways, the picture of the president as a pathetic, unraveling diva is apt.
Trump has said in interviews and at rallies that two of his favorite movies are the blackand-white classics about stars collapsing in on themselves, “Citizen Kane” and “Sunset Boulevard.”
In “Sunset Boulevard,” Max the butler and a camera crew conspire to make the demented silent film star believe she’s getting her close-up when she’s actually just being lured down the staircase to answer for her sins.
The Republicans enabling Trump’s delusion are like the camera crew, filming a scene with the disintegrating diva that is never going to be seen.
Trump, who once wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending USC film school, never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show — pretty good acting now that we know he is neither — and he has stayed a performance artist and a ratings-obsessed showman.
Even after Georgia and Arizona were called and Joe Biden clinched 306 electoral votes — the same number that Trump declared “a massive landslide victory” when he reached it in 2016 — the president is putting on a play within the play, one in which he’s still the star.
Maggie Haberman reported that there is no grand strategy and the president “is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next,” playing his familiar game of creating a controversy and watching it play out.
As a growing number of Trump advisers and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh — and as the Secret Service was rocked by coronavirus infections and quarantine orders from the president’s mask-defying, superspreader campaign travel — White House officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers deserted him and judges ruled against him.
In his remarks about Operation Warp Speed on Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden, Trump showed how tortoise-slow he has been about accepting that he’s out.
“I will not go; this administration will not be going to a lockdown,” he said. “Hopefully, the — the, uh, whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be — I guess time will tell.”
Time has told. Do we detect a sliver of reality creeping in?
The president, who has never shown much interest in governing, has finally dropped all pretense to focus on the core tenets of the Trump Doctrine: himself, cable news, Twitter, self-pity, and caterwauling about perceived slights.
“.@Foxnews daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” he tweeted. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @Foxnews!”
The goose was at Fox’s neck. What an unnatural and delicious sight.
The network helped Trump become president and allowed him to maintain his viselike grip on his base. Fox was the oxygen inside his alternate-reality bubble.
But because Trump is 100 percent transactional, he couldn’t accept pure math, training his laser beam on Fox when it dared to veer from total fealty by correctly calling the race early in Arizona.
Trump is right about this one thing: He has been a Golden Goose for the news business. Every time he opens his mouth, 50 headlines jump out. But the Golden Goose is also a Silly Goose. He should just recognize that Biden winning is actually the best outcome for him. He doesn’t have to do the job anymore and can simply get on with the branding and the whining and the pot-stirring — the parts that interest him.