Trump driven to prove election’s legitimacy
WASHINGTON — In the small dining room next to the Oval Office where he works much of the time, President Donald Trump keeps a stack of color-coded maps of the United States representing the results of the 2016 election. The counties he won are blotchy red and span most of the nation.
Trump sometimes hands the maps out to visitors as a kind of parting gift, and a framed portrait-size version was hung on a wall in the West Wing last week. In conversations, the president dwells on the map and its import, reminding visitors about how wrong the polls were and inflating the scope of his victory.
At the root of Trump’s unpredictable presidency, according to people close to him, is a deep frustration about attacks on his legitimacy, and a worry that Washington does not see him as he sees himself.
As he careens from one controversy to another, many of them of his own making — such as his abrupt decision to fire the FBI director, James B. Comey, who was leading an investigation into the president’s associates — Trump seems determined to prove that he won the election on his own. It was not Russian interference. It was not Comey’s actions in the case involving Hillary Clinton’s emails. It was not a fluke of the Electoral College system. It was all him.
He sits in the dining room or Oval Office stewing over the Russia inquiry that Comey was managing, arguing to anyone who will listen that the matter is all a Democratic-inspired conspiracy to undermine the validity of his victory. Even as he was defending his decision to dismiss Comey last week, Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to investigate voting fraud in a quixotic effort to prove his unsubstantiated contention that he would have won the popular vote against Clinton but for millions of ballots that were illegally cast against him.
Trump burns with frustration over not getting enough credit for winning the nation’s highest office after having never run for office, even for a town alderman seat. He ran when pundits predicted he would not, stayed in when they were certain he would drop out, never lost his core supporters and, amid a dysfunctional campaign that was known for self-inflicted wounds, propelled himself to victory over the vastly more experienced Clinton machine. He expected to be celebrated for it, and that has not happened.
“There’s a lot of anger. I’ve talked with him about it,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Trump’s. “No other president in history has faced the barrage of press attacks, people calling for him to be impeached before he took the oath of office.
“I think the way Trump looks at this is — the big club they’ve tried to get at him is the Russia collusion argument,” Ruddy added. “Trump sees this as a political attack, not a fair attack on him.”
In the process, allies and advisers said, Trump has only made the situation worse for himself. Rather than ignoring the Russia investigation and focusing on priorities such as health care and taxes, he keeps drawing more attention to the subject with intemperate Twitter posts, angry interviews and actions such as the firing of Comey.
He is so consumed by the matter that he studies congressional hearings on the Russia case, scrolling through them using TiVo. The night before dismissing Comey, he invited Time magazine journalists to dinner and, on a 60-inchplus television he has had installed in the dining room, showed them various moments from the hearings, offering play-by-play-style commentary.