Trump’s silent public outing belies White House in tumult
President Donald Trump spent 10 minutes in public Wednesday honoring America’s war veterans — a veneer of normalcy for a White House that’s frozen by a defeated president mulling his options, mostly forgoing the mechanics of governing and blocking his 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 a week. He has spent the past few days in private tweeting angry, unsupported claims of voter fraud.
The president has made no comments in person since Democrat Joe Biden clinched the 270 electoral votes on Saturday needed to win the presidency.
All the while, Trump’s 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.
Trump took to Twitter on 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 on Tuesday before reasserting his allegations on Wednesday.
Trump later posted a debunked video that had purported to show poll workers collecting ballots too late. “You are looking at BALLOTS! Is this what our Country has come to?“Trump fumed.
Trump has made several personnel moves — firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper and installing three staunch loyalists in top defense jobs.
Few senior staffers have been around the president in recent days, with many either in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19 or in insolation after a confirmed exposure or 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.
Trump’s moods have vacillated. 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, in addition to alleged misdoings with mailin ballots.
But aides say he has been calmer than his tweets suggest, believing he needs to keep fighting almost as performance to show the 70 million people who voted for him that he is battling. Some aides, including his daughter, Ivanka, have started to talk to him about an endgame.