The last days of Trump

In 2016, at this stage of the presidential transition process in the United States, Donald Trump had already met in the Oval Office with Barack Obama to receive the advice of the man who would soon succeed as President. “We really discussed many situations, some wonderful, and some difficulties,” Trump said after the 90-minute meeting he had with the outgoing Democratic president on November 10 of that year, just two days after the Republican surprisingly defeated Hillary Clinton.

Four years later and after his defeat to the Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the November 3 elections, Trump has not participated “in the type of work that presidents usually do at this point in their mandate,” as described by Tara McKelvey, a reporter of the BBC in the White House. Instead of collaborating with the presidential transition that will culminate with the inauguration of Biden on January 20, The Republican has been “enraged” by the results of the elections – which he has not yet officially recognized, despite the fact that on Monday the Electoral College ratified Biden’s victory– and has chosen to spend a significant part of his time watching television, as his tweets have shown.

According to the British network, he closely follows One America News Network, a conservative cable channel that is known for its conspiracy theories. And he obviously takes weekend trips to Virginia to play golf, a place where he feels comfortable and loved.

In a recent article in The New York Times, Peter Baker, the newspaper’s chief White House correspondent, referred to this period as “the last days of Trump’s anger and denial.” “Grumpy and, according to his advisers, sometimes depressed, the President hardly shows up for work and does not address the health and economic crisis that plagues the country, and largely eliminates from his public agenda meetings that do not have to see with his desperate attempt to modify the results of the elections ”, wrote the journalist who has covered the last four presidents of the United States.

The Washington Post He has also portrayed in similar terms the reaction of the Republican leader after November 3. Kidnapped from the White House and meditating out of public view after his electoral defeat, furious and sometimes delusional in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, according to a close adviser, like Mad King George, muttering : ‘I won. I win. I won, ‘”the newspaper commented.

As proof of that obsession, over the course of the first week of December Trump posted or republished about 145 messages on Twitter lashing out at the election results, Baker said. The content of the president in that social network is a “torrent of rejections,” he says. “We in no way lost the election,” Trump wrote in recent days. “We won Michigan by a lot!” He commented at another point about a state that lost by more than 154,000 votes. He republished a message that sought to delegitimize Biden: “If he takes office under these circumstances, he will not be called ‘President’, but #occupant of the presidency.

But this was a scenario that March Fisher, Trump Co-Author Revealed (2016), an exhaustive unauthorized biography of the president, I already anticipated. In an interview with La Tercera five days after the elections, the also senior editor of The Washington Post predicted that “Trump will blame others for his defeat, as he has already laid the groundwork for doing with his constant claims that the election was rigged against him. He will be furious with his staff and will likely turn to Twitter, angrily blaming those around him for his failure. “

And it is that the fury of the President, as well as his ambition and drive, “are legendary”, highlights the BBC. Jack O’Donnell, who once ran a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for Trump, says he knows what the president’s thinking has been after the election. “In his head, he will not have lost (…). He will never accept defeat. It will always be: ‘They stole it from me,’ “he told the British network.

O’Donnell also claims to understand why the people who work for him would leave at a time like this. “You are walking on eggshells. Nobody wants to say the wrong thing, “he explained. Once, remember, the real estate entrepreneur was walking through a low-ceilinged room in a building that was in the middle of a renovation. “There were some problems,” O’Donnell said. And soon Trump noticed the mistakes in the renovation. “He jumped into the air and hit the ceiling,” he said. “Nobody wants to be around him when he’s angry,” he added.

Thus, in the countdown to his departure from the White House, Trump “has become obsessed with rewarding his friends, getting rid of disloyal people and punishing an ever-growing list of supposed enemies that now includes Republican governors, a his own attorney general and even Fox News, ”his favorite television network, maintains the Times.

One of the first targets of Trump’s ire was Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who was fired on November 17, after affirming that the last presidential elections were “the safest in history.” “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 elections was very inaccurate, as there were massive fraud and irregularities,” justified the President on his Twitter account.

Then it was the turn of the Secretary of Defense, on November 9. “Mark Esper was fired,” Trump suddenly declared on the same social network. The decision capped a stormy four-year relationship between the White House and the Pentagon, which saw four bosses depart, in part for failing to meet the President’s political goals. According to the BBC, Esper’s resistance to the President’s suggestion to deploy troops to quell protests in different US cities would have triggered his departure. For the Speaker of the House of Representatives and Democratic leader in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, Esper’s firing represents “disturbing evidence” of Trump’s intention to “wreak havoc.”

“Now that Attorney General William Barr has said he did not warn of any fraud nullifying the election, he could be next,” Baker had written on December 7, recalling Trump’s “unpredictable and erratic” character. And indeed, the president’s ally announced this Monday that he will leave office on December 23. The President released Barr’s resignation letter minutes after the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s victory. “I just had a nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been very good, he has done an exceptional job ”, he commented on Twitter.

But not everything has been to fire his “disloyal” collaborators. Trump has slashed his post-election schedule. CNN says that he has practically “taken refuge in the White House.” As of at least November 17, the television network notes, his three public appearances since the election were limited to “an appearance full of lies in the meeting room, a rain-soaked wreath of flowers in Arlington National Cemetery ( for Veterans Day) and comments in the Rose Garden about the coronavirus vaccine. All events ended without questions. ” Even Trump acts that were on the public list but closed to the press were rare during that month. Between November 4-19, he had lunch twice with Vice President Mike Pence and met with his secretaries from the State Department and the Treasury Department. “I have been covering the White House for 12 years. Except for the holidays, I don’t remember so little on a presidential calendar, ”tweeted Michael D. Shear, a journalist for The New York Times, on November 18.

Nor has Trump’s agenda included a classified intelligence briefing in more than a month, CNN noted. Not only that, his administration denies those sessions to Biden. In addition, and unlike any of his contemporary predecessors, the Republican has not called his opponent victorious, much less invited him to the White House for the traditional post-election visit, recalls Baker, who highlights that Trump has said that such He failed to attend Biden’s inauguration, making him the fourth president in US history to refuse to participate in the most important ritual of the peaceful transfer of power, according to Newsweek.

“There is nothing in this (the inauguration of Biden) for him and self-interest seems to be the only thing that motivates (Trump),” Terry Sullivan, professor of political science at the University of Carolina of the Third, tells The Third. North on Chapell Hill and executive director of the White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group that has studied presidential transitions for decades. In Sullivan’s view, Trump is not behaving like his predecessors, who were concerned about how his final days in office would influence his legacy. “He maintains a fiction that he did not lose the election so that his supporters contribute money to a fund apparently to finance his legal challenges, but that in reality he just puts money in his pocket and does not pay the expenses of his legal claims at all” , he assures.

It is, according to the Times, a final rule that Trump is shattering and that contrasts with the last Republican president who transferred power to a Democrat. Former President George W. Bush deliberately left the decision to his successor, Barack Obama, of how to bail out the auto industry and whether or not to approve the increase in troops in Afghanistan. And when Congress called for negotiations on the bank bailouts, Bush stepped aside and let Obama work out a deal with lawmakers before taking office. Instead, since the election, Trump has ordered the withdrawal of thousands of soldiers from Afghanistan, thus disobeying the recommendations of some senior generals. Likewise, his administration officials continue to take punitive measures against China that may further strain the strained relations with Beijing that Biden will inherit.

According to The Washington Post, the 20 days between the November 3 election and the green light for Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in the Trump White House: a government paralyzed by the President’s fragile emotional state; counselors who feed his fables; expletive disputes between factions of aides and advisers, and a pernicious confusion of truth and fantasy.

Meanwhile, many of those who work in the White House seem resigned to their fate and are preparing for the new administration. The desks in the West Wing are in order. Some have almost been eliminated, says the BBC. A climate of insecurity reinforced by Trump’s own decisions. According to CNN, an edict from his chief of staff stated that anyone caught looking for a job will be fired immediately. However, many resumes from the White House would have already reached the Capitol. A foreign policy expert who still works for the government told the BBC that he and his colleagues are waiting for the end. “There’s not much to do except watch it unfold,” he said resignedly.