A Crack in the Armor

Donald Trump is a con man. If you don’t see it, then you’re his mark.

Relax, we all have been his mark at one time or another. As for me, I am tired of it.

I’m tired of fake patriotism. I’m tired of propaganda with theater props. I’m tired of lies. I’m tired of phony Christianity. I’m tired of games.

But mostly I’m tired of dealing with Donald J. Trump.

Last Friday afternoon I said to him during a public gathering in the Rose Garden, “Mr. President, you lost the election. When will you admit that you lost the election? When will you admit you lost the election…sir?”

President Trump did not answer. Instead, he walked away. He took no questions after staging a ceremonial pep rally that was designed to tell us all how great he is and how fantastically his administration has handled the pandemic that has killed 250,000 in the United States.

I was unsure if anyone had been as blunt with him as I was, but I thought it best to be direct. After all, a lot of water had raced under the bridge since Trump’s Brady Briefing Room appearance eight days earlier, when I had asked him why he was lying to us and why he was delusional. I vowed not to go so easy on him the next time out.

In both instances Trump did not respond. But way back on September 23 he took questions in the briefing room, and after his rambling plea to be loved, he called on me first. “Win, lose or draw in this election, will you commit today to a peaceful transferal of power after the election?” He responded, “We’re going to have to see what happens,” before complaining about ballots and seeming to suggest some be thrown out. “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very, we’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly; there’ll be a continuation.” Six weeks before the election, Trump said there would not be a transfer of power.

Everything we see from Trump lately reflects back to that answer. I believe it is the only thing that matters now. Trump lost. It’s a fact. Deal with it or don’t deal with it. I don’t care. But give me an answer to my question.

Naturally I had to wait nearly an hour to ask my question last Friday. I had already fallen into a mild stupor listening to Trump and four others, including the vice president, bore us with the most callous and obvious lies. It was like being shot up with propofol. It’s hard to feel anything other than catatonic when Mike Pence tells us the coming vaccine is the cavalry that will save us. With 250,000 lives lost, the cavalry isn’t here to save us; it’s here for morgue duty.

As Trump faced us he looked small—bored yet nervous. He seemed unable to stop fidgeting, whether he was rocking slightly, rotating left and right to make eye contact with people or looking intensely at the ground as if it were somehow part of the perceived conspiracy against him. Sometimes he gazed into the distance, as if wishing he were anywhere but the Rose Garden. Other times he looked numb. He has winked at me on occasion during similar events. I caught his eye Friday and finally returned the wink.

At one point, as he declared his administration would not order a nationwide lockdown to combat the coronavirus surge, Trump seemed about to mention the incoming Biden administration. “Whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be.” Then he recovered. But the crack in Donald’s armor was exposed.

The realization is slowly sinking in. It’s a hard trip through a thick head.

The country would be better off if he finishes his grieving process sooner rather than later. But don’t count on that. Sunday night he apparently blew out his last synapse and tweeted, “I WON THE ELECTION!” I tweeted back, “I am Spartacus!” Neither is true, but my claim is more plausible.

There are those on Trump’s staff who believe he will eventually come around and do the right thing and perhaps even attend Joe Biden’s inauguration. “There is some ceremonial attention for the outgoing president,” a staffer reminded me. Trump loves the spotlight, so who knows. Others doubt he’ll be around. On Tuesday Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen told me he’s betting that Trump takes a powder after Christmas—a position shared by some Vegas oddsmakers, plenty of reporters and other observers who follow presidential politics as if it were a blood sport. Trump might check in to Mar-a-Lago over the holidays and never return to D.C., but members of the staff I spoke with think he’ll stick around at the White House. Yet, “I don’t think he’ll invite the Bidens over like Obama invited Trump,” one senior adviser told me.

The poor White House staff is like a weird, dysfunctional family: Some need therapy, some need sedatives and all need relief after the past four years—even the true believers. All of them are probably secretly looking forward to the last day on the job. Except Stephen Miller. He’s so clueless, he’s like the guy in a horror movie who decides to hide in the graveyard.

About six “Scaramuccis” from now (62 days, that is), Trump will be just another old coot tweeting crazy insults. Donny will lose a lot of his audience along with the presidential bully pulpit. That’s what’s really eating him. That’s why he screams and contests an election he knows he lost. It ignites his fans. It’s like a war cry from a professional wrestler. And like professional wrestling, it’s all shtick. Trump told the Proud Boys to stand by. Some gasped. Some smiled. Some were fearful. Was Donny setting up a civil war? No. Of course not. We found out this weekend he merely wanted the Proud Boys and other supporters to show up and cheer him Saturday as he drove to his golf course. And thousands did!

No one craves attention more than Donald Trump. “Donald Trump is a racist, a con man and a coward,” Cohen told me; we had been chatting for an episode of his podcast, Mea Culpa. “If your children acted this way, you’d smack them on the ass. What blinded me was the celebrity.”

Trump blinds a lot of people, and on January 20 Joe Biden will inherit the chaos Donny created. He will have to deal with the coronavirus, the Trump trolls and a GOP that thinks politics is a zero-sum game. That was a lesson they learned from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is all about it. To the craven GOP, Biden riding back into town talking about “unity” must look a lot like a Christian throwing himself to the lions. Still, they all know Joe, and they respect him.

But Biden and the Democrats cannot steamroll the GOP into unity. Biden will have to bring different viewpoints to the table and find compromise. That won’t sit well with some of the progressives in his party, and it probably won’t placate the Republican Party’s far right—which today is the majority of the Republican Party.

American political culture now resembles children fighting in a sandbox while screaming, “He started it! He hit me first.”

Biden will have to be the stern parent and also a patient one. If he can get a majority of people to wear face masks, he will make greater strides toward unity than some expect. He is now half of two historic U.S. administrations: He served as vice president to the first Black president and will work with the first woman—and the first woman of color—to be vice president. So if Biden is talking unity, he’s got the gravitas to speak, and I’ll listen.

I haven’t heard much yet, other than promises. When I asked for specifics from his campaign I was referred to a speech he recently made; it was short on details. You don’t get into the weeds in a speech, but hopefully the president-elect will soon be forthcoming with detailed plans. Maybe he’ll even encourage reporters to ask questions rather than forcing them to yell questions at pep rallies.

Trump is a failure. He’s doomed to be relegated to the dustbin of history, where wannabe dictators and con men with fond memories of things that never happened imagine they are eternally worshipped and wept over. Appropriately, the Trump reign of error is ending on the same note with which it began: lying about crowd size. Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed more than 1 million people showed up to offer Trump love in D.C. over the weekend; the reality is more like thousands.

Expect Trump to spend his last two months behaving like a petulant child, grabbing as much cash as he can from the Treasury while making it as difficult as possible for Biden to be successful once he takes office.

Despite these barriers, Biden can still be successful—if he can find a way to get people to talk to one another and not at one another.

The cause is not yet lost.

Give peace a chance.