Trump's presidency could only ever have ended one way, but
Donald Trump’s presidency could only ever have ended one way, but there was still a certain flubby majesty to how it happened. As the outcome of the election became clearer and more irrefutable—as the votes were counted in the maddening, analog, rather inspiringly effective way that votes are counted, and as cities and towns across the country erupted into giddy street celebrations after the election was called decisively for Biden—Trump and his campaign began a wild-eyed public speedrun through the stages of grief. The end of election week unfolded like the booming grand finale of a fireworks program, albeit with every explosion replaced with skeins of bizarrely punctuated and wholly untrue social media posts, rafts of clammy lawsuits, and stilted press conferences in which Trump’s inner circle blinked rapidly and spoke in vague and heated terms about all the many serious things they’d soon be looking into very strongly.
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He would make idle threats and lash out where and whenever it seemed safe; he would yell at his television when it defied him and, when every other option was gone, do as much damage as he could, wherever he could, out of spite and out of habit. Long before the pandemic reshaped the election, Trump made it clear that any electoral outcome not in his favor would by its nature be illegitimate, and therefore subject to Very Powerful Executive Reversal. As with everything Trump, who has so often been ridiculous and childish and wrong and so seldom been held accountable, his reaction to the results was much easier to laugh at in the abstract.
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This is Trump going out exactly as he governed—by telling someone whose name he’d soon forget to fix a problem he didn’t care enough about to understand, and then watching television to see how well he was doing. It’s axiomatic that the man doesn’t really understand what he’s mad about; Trump never really knows anything about anything. As wildly irresponsible as his behavior has been since the election, and as queasy as it is to watch him flail and fume and feint his way through what is either an exceptionally oafish attempted coup or the single most tasteless fundraising gambit in the history of American politics, the spectacle has mostly just been confounding. All these endlessly bruited breakthroughs-to-come and all that clock-killing bluster collapses at some point into a defiant and incoherent sheet of noise. Nothing about Trump ever improves or even changes; the end was always going to be a parodic reprise of the beginning.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/160222/trump-tweets-coup-littlest-prince
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