The Final Gasp of Donald Trump's Presidency
The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency
By Olivia Nuzzi
Donald Trump going out with a limp seems like an oxymoron,” a senior adviser to the president told me. In width and in word, in soaring skyscrapers and Brioni suits and arena rallies and various euphemisms for great (yuge, bigly), the man has been defined by and obsessed with largeness. His presidency is ending small.
Trump is guided by instinct on most days, but the final year of his presidency was marked by something unusual: He wasn’t sure what to believe or what to do anymore. At first he feared Joe Biden, then he thought he was a joke, and then the joke was on him. By the summer, Trump understood that he could lose. Surrounded by yes-men, he yearned, on occasion, for the truth they would not give him. “At one point, he said, ‘Well, how are all the polls wrong?’ ” the adviser recalled. And by Election Day, he understood that losing was inevitable. He accepted, even if he had no plans to concede, that his presidency was over.
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This person, who speaks to the president often — or, more accurately, who listens and says uh-huh as the president speaks — said that Trump is not just done for, but done. “He wants to lose. He’s out of money. He worries about being arrested. He worried about being assassinated,” they said. “It hasn’t been a great experience for him. He likes showing people around the White House, but the actual day-to-day business of being president? It’s been pretty unpleasant for him.”
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Former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg didn’t buy that Trump could ever be okay with losing, but he figured he’d find a way to cope. After all, the plan in 2015, before Trump formally announced his candidacy, had been to drop out of the race and return to The Apprentice claiming that he could’ve won if he’d wanted to (NBC inadvertently kept him on the campaign trail when they severed its relationship with him over his anti-immigrant comments). That’s not so different from how Trump is preparing to spin his real loss now.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/donald-trump-presidency-election-week.html
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