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WASHINGTON (AP) – Donald Trump spent 10 minutes in public honoring America’s war veterans, a veneer of normalcy for a White House that is frozen by a defeated president pondering his options, mostly forgoing mechanics. of ruling and blocking his inevitable successor.
Trump’s appearance Wednesday 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 privately tweeting angry and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
The president has not commented in person since Democrat Joe Biden won the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency on Saturday.
Meanwhile, his advisers are increasingly confident that legal challenges will not change the outcome of the election, according to seven campaign and White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the thinking of the president and others at the mansion. executive. .
Before departing for the solemn commemoration in Arlington, Trump took to Twitter Wednesday to criticize “bogus pollsters” and complain that a Republican city commissioner who defended the tabulation of votes in Philadelphia was not a true Republican. He also tried to draw attention to a Pennsylvania poll worker who recanted allegations of voter fraud on Tuesday before reaffirming his allegations Wednesday.
Later, Trump posted a discredited video purporting to show poll workers collecting ballots too late.
“You’re looking at TICKETS! Is this what our country has come to? “Trump was enraged.
Although his official schedule has been devoid of public events, Trump has made several personnel moves: He fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and installed three loyalists in top defense positions. His choice as Acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, was one of the Pentagon’s top brass who joined him in Arlington.
Some supporters rejected the idea that Trump is shirking his presidential duties.
“The president is on Twitter as much as ever, and the White House team is moving forward with budget and personnel priorities,” said Dan Eberhart, a prominent Republican donor and Trump supporter.
He added: “The president is understandably focused on counting the votes, but sometime soon he needs to refocus his attention on the lame duck session and put a finishing touch on his first four years.”
However, few high-level staff members have been close to the president in recent days, and many are in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19 or in heatstroke after a confirmed exposure or simply do not want to be near the office. Oval, according to White House staff and campaign officials. Staff working at the White House dwindled after Chief of Staff Mark Meadows confirmed last week that he had tested positive for the virus.
Some staff members still believe that the election outcome can change with litigation and recount. But there is growing recognition among the majority that the election was lost and the building will be vacant on January 20.
Trump’s moods have wavered in recent days. At times, he has been enraged, enraged that he lost to a candidate he disrespects, and believing that the media, including what he sees as typically friendly Fox News, worked against him. In addition to the mistakes with the vote-by-mail ballots.
But attendees say he’s been calmer than his tweets suggest, showing a greater understanding of his situation and believing that he needs to keep fighting almost like a performance, like a show for the 70 million people who voted for him that he still has. is fighting. In recent days, some aides, including his daughter Ivanka, have started talking to him about an ending, questioning how much longer he wants to fight.
Outside the White House, a prominent former ally turned critic of Trump warned that the president was doing potentially irreparable damage to the Republican Party.
“The real problem is the serious damage it is causing to public confidence in the US constitutional system,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday. “Trump’s time is running out, even as his rhetoric continues to mount.”
But no one in his inner circle – the West Wing staff or the Cabinet – is pushing hard for him to stop.
Though he’s been in the Oval Office late two nights this week, the president has done little in the way of governing and instead has been working the phones.
He has called on friendly governors – in red states like Arizona, Texas and Florida – and influential confidants in the conservative media, like Sean Hannity. But he has not responded as much to Republican lawmakers as he did before the election. Always an obsessive viewer of cable news, he has been watching even more television than usual in recent weeks, often from his private dining room next to the Oval Office.
Trump’s focus on two crucial Senate runoff elections in Georgia remains an open question: He has not yet signaled whether he will campaign there, and aides have begun to worry that the protracted legal battle could undermine support for the candidates. republicans.
Trump has also started to talk about his own future upon leaving office. He has pondered declaring that he will run again in 2024, and his aides believe he will at least openly flirt with the idea to enhance his relevance and increase interest in any money-making endeavor he pursues.
As he ponders his options, his involvement in the nation’s day-to-day government has nearly come to a halt: Based on his schedule, he hasn’t attended an intelligence briefing in weeks, and the White House has done little lately to manage the unfolding pandemic it has shot up to record levels in many states.
The president’s resistance to acknowledging the outcome of the contest has stalled the transition process. The Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration has refrained from certifying Biden as the winner of the election.
The certification, known as verification, would free up money for the transition and clear the way for Biden’s team to begin placing transition staff in federal agencies. White House spokesman Judd Deere said he was “not aware” of any communication between the White House and the GSA administrator about the verification.
Biden on Tuesday downplayed the importance of certification for now, saying his team continues to prepare to take the reins of the US government. The president-elect also suggested he was not overly concerned that he has not yet received the President’s Daily Report, a highly classified intelligence analysis.
Denis McDonough, who served as the White House chief of staff during the Obama administration and helped oversee the 2017 transition of power, said that even as Trump has tried to block the transition, significant progress has still been made. Biden’s transition team has released an ethics plan and the Trump administration previously established a Transition Coordinating Council in the White House as required by law.
