Donald Trump’s ‘sad and pathetic’ final moments at the White House

His presidency was defined by showmanship and bravery, but Donald Trump’s final moments in the White House were “sad and pathetic.”

The self-described billionaire spent his final days in Washington DC isolated from his legions of followers, banned by Twitter and Facebook; with a virtually empty schedule and the lowest approval rating of any president, according to the Pew Research Center.

As millions of Americans tuned in to watch his successor, Joe Biden, take the oath of office as the nation’s 46th president, delivering what one news anchor called “the best inaugural address I’ve ever heard,” Trump greeted a small crowd of approximately 200 before boarding Air Force One with his family and members of the media.

“It was a somewhat sad and pathetic sight,” Jim Acosta, who led CNN’s coverage of the 74-year-old during his presidency, told the network’s Reliable Sources.

“I had never seen him so lonely in all the time he was at the level of presidential politics.”

As he wandered the increasingly empty White House “like a ghost” in his last week in office, Trump was “consumed” by the thoughts of “the only election he lost,” when to leave Washington, whether to forgive his family and what to do. what he would do when he got to Florida, his new home, Anita Kumar, Gabby Orr and Meredith McGraw of Politico wrote in an article last week.

“His last days were uneventful. He insisted he was working … But he wasn’t really working. He was disappearing,” the article reads.

“He was a man, a leader, a president almost unrecognizable to those who had watched him for the past four years. Diminished. Adrift. Huraño.”

Current and former aides and Republican allies described Trump’s “final days in office as a countdown to oblivion, with the energy of the once chaotic West Wing fading as signs announcing the arrival of his replacement appeared outside their windows “.

“In recent days, the man who had so relentlessly imposed himself on the public, whose tweet storms and rants throughout the day disturbed our sleep and weighed down our days, vanished from sight in a bleak purgatory of his own design.

It marked a definite change in mood from the days in the White House after the election, when New York magazine Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi described Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that he had lost the election and that staff “frustrated “had succumbed to” petty infighting. “

“The visibly frustrated and angry president had been glued to the television, tweeting and complaining that there were not enough people defending his claim that his election had been stolen,” CNN reported at the time.

But a CBS correspondent also noted that the atmosphere had turned gloomy, with “lots of empty desks” and a “creepy” feeling, a harbinger of things to come in the months to come.

“When it comes to how your own staff and your own advisers and your own allies feel, it has never been less feared than now,” Nuzzi said Dec. 9.

If the final weeks of Trump’s presidency hadn’t involved him instigating a deadly attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, a last-ditch attempt by his most loyal supporters, fueled by his own words and incendiary behavior. of their leader, to overturn the election results, and a historic second impeachment, things could have been very different.

“Basically what we saw was the ruin of the Trump presidency,” Acosta said.

“What we saw the president build over the course of four or five years in the election campaign and in the White House just fell apart in the end.”

Former Trump campaign spokesman and White House official Hogan Gidley told Showtime’s The Circus that Trump’s final days were a “black eye” for his presidency.

“I don’t want to guess or try to put thoughts in his head or words in his mouth. All I can do is watch what he said in real time,” Gidley said.

“I don’t know if he regrets something or not.”

Trump may have been sad and lonely this past week, but the “lord of lies,” as Acosta called him, will not remain in hiding for long, he said.

“While he is still licking his wounds in Mar-a-Lago, he poses a threat to this country,” Acosta said.

“This is not the time to put our fact-checkers in some kind of box on a shelf. They will be needed to verify this move. Trump may go away, but Trumpism won’t.