Trump’s final days of rage and denial
WASHINGTON >> Over the past week, President Donald 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 detachedfrom-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 a cowed court. And though he will leave office in 46 days, the past few weeks may only foreshadow what he will be like after he departs. Trump almost certainly will 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 Joe Biden. 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.
At times, Trump’s railing-againsthis-fate outbursts seem like a story straight out of William Shakespeare, part tragedy, part farce, full of sound and fury. Is 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.”
Unlike any of his modern predecessors, Trump has not called his victorious opponent, much less invited him to the White House for the traditional postelection visit. Trump has indicated that he may not attend 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 Biden. Only 25 of 249 Republican members of Congress surveyed by The Washington Post publicly acknowledged 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 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.”
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 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. 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, Trump fired him. Now that Attorney General William Barr has said he saw no fraud that would overturn the results, he may be next. 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 U.S. was telling them. Which explains why the only topic other than the election to draw Trump’s interest over the past week was the annual defense bill that he vowed to veto because Congress did not strip a 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 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 each day.
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.”
With more than six weeks until he leaves office, Trump remains as unpredictable and erratic as ever. He may fire 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 Wilson, the Shakespearean scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”