The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

The election, Giuliani added, had been stolen in seven battleground states that had a combination of Democrat-run big cities and sufficient electoral votes. “This was the worst election in American history,” he said. All could be proven, he insisted, if only the Democrats and Pence would let them keep investigating.

THEY HAD 60 CHANCES

But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had never heard from the commander in chief on a day when the Capitol was overrun by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump, he said, was both “shameful” and “complicit.”

“There were fingerprints all over our desks, which was eerie,” remembered Susan Collins, who would end the night sleeping over at her colleague Lisa Murkowski’s Capitol Hill townhouse, drinking wine in front of the fireplace just before dawn and wondering how it had come to this.

Bc you ignored all of our warnings that trump was a cult leader and a narcissist

headed. “I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy said. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it.”[11]

And then they did

Speechwriters had written the sentence, “We wish President Biden and Vice President Harris great success in keeping America strong, prosperous and free,” but put it in brackets since they did not know if he would say it. He would not. He could not bring himself to utter the words “President Biden.” Without naming him, Trump said simply, “I wish the new administration great luck and great success.”

Toddler

As always with Trump, he never stopped overstating even legitimately good news. The “best economy in history” was not really that. Even putting aside the pandemic, Trump’s economy was roughly similar to what he inherited from Barack Obama, growing 7.7 percent and adding 6.2 million jobs during his first three years compared with 7.5 percent and 7.6 million new jobs in the previous three years. The stock market did significantly better; the S&P index grew 44 percent in Trump’s first three years compared with 25 percent in Obama’s final three years. But Trump failed to fulfill pledges to reduce the trade deficit (it went up instead) or revive the coal industry (it went down instead). The national debt, which Trump boasted he could wipe out in its entirety in eight years, instead increased by $7.8 trillion.

People he had no words of criticism for? Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, the January 6 rioters, or white supremacists. For all that, Trump never explained why he hired so many stupid and mentally unfit people in the first place, much less what that would say about his judgment if they really were so incompetent.

It did not matter, to Trump or his followers, that not one independent authority, not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one election agency, not one official who was not a Trump partisan ever found widespread fraud. None. Even an audit in Arizona sponsored by Trump allies only confirmed the result. A federal judge described the effort to overturn the election as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and opined that Trump most likely committed conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct the work of Congress. A bipartisan House investigating committee concluded that Trump had committed a crime.