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It will take a miracle now, in fact several of them, but President Trump is not ready to throw in the towel. At least in public, he’s always full of fights.
“This election was stolen,” he said. “It was a rigged election, 100%, and everyone knows it.”
“Is it going to be that I got about 74 million votes, and I lost?” he adds. “It is not possible.”
It was nearly 6 p.m. Friday and I had reached the President after his late-afternoon update on Operation Warp Speed, the successful race to produce a vaccine against the coronavirus. Rose Garden’s presentation had been smooth and efficient, but he seemed resigned to never getting credit for pushing government and industry to quickly complete a process that usually takes years.
“Six months to produce a vaccine,” he says. “Joe Biden couldn’t have done that, but you don’t get any credit.”
Except for his silent appearance on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetery, the vaccine update was his first time on camera since the election, an absence that seemed like a lifetime given its ubiquity for four years. He did not answer any questions and did not give any interviews.
Earlier on Friday, he spoke to longtime friend Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, Rivera saying on Twitter that the president admitted winning was a “long shot” and that he would ultimately do “the right thing” .
I had a similar sense of the president’s mood, even though he resisted saying anything definitive. In our 10 minute phone interview, he spoke evenly, showing no anger or even agitation. There was a neutral tone that suggested an understanding of the inevitable.
In different ways, I asked if he would accept the results if his court challenges failed.
“We’ll see how it turns out,” he said at one point.
When I asked him if he could accept defeat, he replied only that “it’s hard to get along when they won’t let your poll observers watch” the count.
A third time he said, “Again, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.”
He seems genuinely convinced that the victory has been stolen and has repeatedly emphasized the Dominion’s voting systems, a technology used by most states, including Michigan and Georgia.
“It was refused by the state of Texas because it is not sure,” Trump said. He also repeated claims that some owners and investors of the private company had ties to Democrats, and it is true that the company made a contribution and worked with the Clinton Family Foundation during the Obama-Biden administration. .
The Associated Press confirms that a former senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is one of the lobbyists for the company. The AP said the company also employs a lobbyist who has worked for Republicans Dick Cheney and John Boehner.
These bipartisan relations are not positive in Trump World. Instead, they portray Dominion as a creature from the swamp that Trump came to Washington to drain.
Although Biden holds a decisive lead in the Electoral College and has won 78 million popular votes, Trump cannot reconcile his position with the campaign and the successful performance of the GOP as a whole.
He cited the massive and enthusiastic crowds at his gatherings as proof. “A small gathering had 25,000 people and Biden had tiny crowds, no one came,” he said. “I was not losing these states.”
He also noted that the GOP has apparently held the Senate, based on the two rounds in Georgia, and is in the process of picking up perhaps 12 House seats and overthrowing the state legislative chambers.
“We are doing very well,” he said.
My hunch is that when there are no more remedies, the President will admit defeat while maintaining his fraud allegations. Whether he does that in a speech, statement, or just a tweet is part of the drama he is good at creating.
Soon, however, custom demands that he invite Biden to the White House for a photoshoot and order his team to cooperate with the incoming administration. Barack Obama bit his lip and did it with Trump in 2016, and Trump should graciously hand the baton over to Biden.
It won’t be pleasant, but the president would be doing himself, his supporters and his future no favor if he let resentment reign over his last actions as president. An election is supposed to give the country the necessary respite from the hostilities of the countryside.
Of course, when Trump was elected, that respite was shorter than the blink of an eye. Its many grievances against Democrats, the mainstream media, and big tech are valid, and a fair story must reflect that its enormous political successes have come despite unfair, anti-American attacks on its legitimacy.
In this regard, he sees the election results as the final act of a confederation against him that began with the Obama-Biden administration’s bribery of the FBI and CIA to spy on him in 2016 and tip the election to Hillary Clinton. This effort spawned the Russia, Russia, and Russia narrative that was not fully revealed as false until the investigation into Special Advocate Robert Mueller finally came to an end in 2019.
“It’s amazing but nothing has happened to [Jim] Comey and [Andrew] McCabe, even though they were caught cold, ”he said of disgraced former FBI executives.
“Then this, the greatest theft in American history. And everyone knows it.
He complained about polls that caused him to lose battlefield states by large margins, calling them “suppression polls” because they discouraged donors and voters alike.
“These weren’t accidents or bad pollsters,” Trump said. “These are corrupt institutions,” and he chose ABC and the Washington Post.
He didn’t even mention partisan impeachment, making him the third president to face such infamy. At the time, it seemed the most outrageous act of all, but ultimately it was part of a reprehensible pattern of dirty tricks.
Almost after the fact, Trump spoke about how most of the media ignored the Post’s exclusive reporting of Hunter Biden’s laptop bomb emails that implicate Joe Biden in his son’s business plans.
“They didn’t even report all of the Biden family crimes,” Trump said. “If I did that. . . “
Assessing the full impact of his presidency will be the job of future historians, but there is no doubt that Trump, warts and all, has been a resounding success in accomplishing the fundamental purpose of his election.
He made a much needed course correction in Washington and remade the Republican Party. Its economic populism transforms the GOP into a multiracial, multiethnic party of working class wrestlers and early Americans while forcing Democrats to choose between the radical far left and the remnants of traditional liberals.
Whatever the president decides about his personal future, Trumpism is alive. This alone is conclusive proof that Donald Trump was an extremely consistent president whose policies improved the lives of millions and millions of Americans.
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