Trump makes Veterans Day appearance
Aides: President mostly skips duties as he blocks transition
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spent 10 minutes in public Wednesday honoring America’s war veterans — a veneer of normalcy for a White House that has appeared frozen by a defeated president mulling his options, mostly forgoing the mechanics of governing and blocking his inevitable successor.
Trump’s appearance at the annual Veterans Day commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery was his first public outing for official business in more than aweek. He’s spent the past few days in private, tweeting angry, unsupported claims of voter fraud.
The president has made no comments in person since Saturday when Democrat Joe Biden clinched the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
All the while, his aides grow more certain that legal challenges won’t change the outcome of the election, according to seven campaign and White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the thinking of the president and others in the executive mansion.
Before setting off for the sole mn commemoration at Arlington, Trump took to
Twitter Wednesday to slam “fake pollsters” and grouse that a Republican city commissioner who defended the vote tabulation in Philadelphia wasn’ t a true Republican. He also sought to draw attention to a Pennsylvania poll worker who recanted allegations of voter fraud Tuesday before reasserting his allegations Wednesday.
Trump later posted a debunked video that had purported to show pollworkers collecting ballots too late.
“You are looking at BALLOTS! Is this what our Country has come to?” Trump fumed.
Although his official schedule has been bare of public events, Trump has made several personnel moves — firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and installing three staunch loyalists in top defense jobs. His pick as acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, was among the Pentagon brass that joined him at Arlington.
Some supporters pushed back against the notion that Trump is shirking his presidential duties.
“The president is out there as much as he’s ever been on Twitter, and the White House team are moving ahead with budget and staffing priorities,” said Dan Eb erhart, a prominent Republican donor and Trump backer.
He added, “The president is understandably focused on the ballot counting, but at some point soon he needs to turn his attention back to the lame duck session and putting a capstone on his first four years.”
However, few senior staffers have been around the president in recent days, with many either in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19 or in isolation after a confirmed exposure or simply not wanting to be near the Oval Office, according to White House staffers and campaign officials. Staff working from the White House thinned out after chief of staff Mark Meadows confirmed last week that he had tested positive for the virus.
Some staffers still believe the election outcome can change with litigation andre counts. But there is a growing recognition among most that the election is lost and the building willbe vacated by Jan. 20.
Trump’s moods have vacillated over recent days. At times, he has seethed with anger, fuming that he lost to a candidate he doesn’t respect and believing that the media— including what he views as typically friendly Fox News — worked against him.
But aides say he has been calmer than his tweets suggest, showing greater understanding of his predicament and believing that he needs to keep fighting almost as performance, as a show to the more than 70 million people who voted for him that he is still battling. In recent days, some aides, including his daughter Ivanka, have started to talk to him about an endgame, questioning how much longer he wants to fight.
Though he has been in the Oval Office late two nights this week, the president has done little in the way of governing and has instead been working the phones.
He has called friendly governors — in red states like Arizona, Texas and Florida—and influential confidants in the conservative media, like Sean Han ni ty. But he has not been as responsive to Republican lawmakers as before the election. Always an obsessive cable news viewer, he has been watching even more TV than usual in recent weeks, often from his private dining room just off the Oval Office.
Trump has also begun talking about his own future upon leaving office. He has mused about declaring he will run again in 2024, and aides believe that he will at least openly flirt with the idea to enhance his relevance and raise interest in whatever money-making efforts he pursues.
While he ponders his options, his involvement in the day-to-day governing of the nation has nearly stopped.
According to his schedule, he has not attended an intelligence briefing in weeks, and the White House has done little of late to manage the pandemic that has surged to record highs inmany states.