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From the start, Trump’s advisers alternated between urgently seeking his attention on the coronavirus and arguing among themselves over what to do once they secured
Azar went to the Roosevelt Room and signed an order declaring a public health emergency, an action recorded only with a cell phone picture snapped by his chief of staff after Trump’s aides refused even to send the official White House photographer.
Barr’s intervention to spare a politically connected friend of the president was a remarkable break from tradition and reeked of favoritism.
Kravis resigned from the Justice Department altogether, while the other three stepped down from the case in the biggest mass resignation of the Trump era.
The attorney general took the extraordinary action of asking a court to drop the case even though Flynn had pleaded guilty not once but twice. Barr
Trump was so eager to come to terms that he cut the Afghan government itself out of the negotiations altogether, although its troops had been fighting alongside America for two decades.
Where Pence’s staff saw a communications problem, Trump saw a political threat. The virus was not a looming public health disaster but an extension of the post-impeachment partisan war he was fighting with Democrats and the Deep State.
Trump had no idea how to handle it. The virus did not respond to his favorite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful. Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House,
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The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency—his distrust of his own staff and the rest of the government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.
Only a handful of reporters were physically in the briefing room every day for Trump’s performances, not because the White House, which still resisted precautions, had imposed social distancing rules but because the correspondents themselves insisted upon it.
The president made clear that governors desperate for help needed to genuflect to get it.
Trump would entertain about the coronavirus, perhaps the most nonsensical was that the pandemic would not be so bad if the government simply stopped testing so much—as if the testing was causing the virus to spread.
he helped make mask wearing a political statement and one more battleground in the country’s perpetual culture war.
He wanted thousands of them. He wanted strength. He even turned to Milley and asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”[5]
On June 2, Esper was stunned to receive an official written directive from Trump, essentially giving the Pentagon until the end of September to withdraw ten thousand of the thirty-five thousand American troops stationed in Germany.
“Do you know why the withdrawal of the troops happened?” asked a senior German official. “Because she said ‘no’ when he called her.”
The simple truth was that this was happening now because Merkel had refused to come to Washington in the middle of a public health crisis, thus ruining Trump’s plans to use the G7 summit as a stage set for his “Pandemic? What pandemic?” re-election campaign.
Trump would be upset if he noticed too many Black Americans on the gambling floor. “It’s a little dark tonight,” he would tell O’Donnell, who also claimed that Trump asserted that “laziness is a trait in Blacks” and complained about an African American accountant.
Trump was hardly the only president to embrace racism, but he did so more overtly than any in generations.
president had received his first positive test result on September 26, the same day as the Amy Coney Barrett “superspreader” event, but had nonetheless continued to travel around the country without quarantining or taking any real precautions to avoid infecting others.
Never in American history had a sitting president sought to use the power of the state to imprison his main political challenger a month before the election.
By Ginsberg’s count, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party had already filed more than forty lawsuits around the country in advance of the balloting, challenging various local and state-level voting and ballot measures, every single suit aiming to limit the vote in some way. Ginsberg
On what basis, Meadows demanded, had Fox decided? “Math,” Sammon answered.
For them, the city was now a liberal bastion of anger toward their family, not to mention a jurisdiction filled with state and local authorities with subpoena power,
“We either have a vote WE control and WE win OR it gets kicked to Congress 6 January 2021,” Don Jr. wrote.
Trump and his allies would file more than sixty lawsuits in more than half a dozen states, going all the way to the Supreme Court twice, only to lose nearly across the board. They sought recounts and audits and forensic investigations
Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Scott Perry of
Pennsylvania. With Rudy Giuliani joining them, the group discussed plans for House members to object on January 6 to electoral votes from swing states that went for Biden. They could push to accept alternate pro-Trump electoral slates or perhaps simply negate enough states that the election would be thrown to the House to decide.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
Now, Pence explained to Quayle that some lawyers working for Trump were telling him that the vice president could unilaterally reject some of Biden’s electoral votes.
In their view, that case had been too long, too abstract, too repetitive, too partisan, too condescending, and the managers far too wordy.
managers excised words like “equality” and “dignity” from their speeches and instead embraced more GOP-friendly buzzwords like “honor” and “oath” and “patriotism.”
only the fifth president in a century to be evicted from the White House by the voters. He was, in the end, a twice-impeached loser,
Trump, after all, finished his presidency with a total of 30,573 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post fact-checking project.
He was the first president since Benjamin Harrison to lose the popular vote twice.
We know he would do these things because those are exactly the things that he did and said for all four years of his first term in the presidency.
