A First for an American President, and a First for Donald Trump

[Zorro]

In the final moments of his presidency, Mr. Trump is confronting an unfamiliar fate: He is being held to account as never before for things he has said.

When President Trump faced (and overcame) the gravest crisis of his first campaign, he defended his boasts of sexual assault on the “Access Hollywood” tape as ultimately harmless gabbing. “Locker room talk,” he said, nothing to dwell on.

When the president faced (and overcame) impeachment in 2019 after pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., he insisted it was merely an innocuous case of two guys talking. “A perfect call,” he said, not a high crime.

And when Mr. Trump leaves the White House no later than Wednesday — amid the impeachment sequel and uncommon comeuppance he has encountered since inciting a riotous mob in Washington on Jan. 6 — he will surrender a valued perk: an executive phone system, he once enthused, that made it feel as though his words would self-destruct before they became self-destructive.

“The world’s most secure system,” Mr. Trump marveled in a 2017 interview during his first week in office, observing that no one was listening in and recording. “The words just explode in the air.”

Poof. Gone. Just as he likes it.

For most of Mr. Trump’s 74 years, the relationship between his words and their consequences has been fairly straightforward: He says what he wants, and nothing particularly durable tends to happen to him.

But in the final frames of his presidency, Mr. Trump is confronting an unfamiliar fate. He is being held to account as never before for things he has said, finding his typical defenses — denial, obfuscation, powerful friends, claiming it was all a big joke — insufficient in explaining away a violent mob acting in his name.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/us/politics/donald-trump-consequences.html

[BigmanPigman]

1. Being held accountable is new to him,

and another new experience will be not having everyone's attention to feed his enormous ego. His niece has made it clear that being a "loser" is truly the worst thing in the world for Donald. His father was obsessed with winning "at any cost". He is going to have a nervous breakdown.