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

by Peter Baker

only forty-seven miles of new primary wall were added along the two-thousand-mile border. And none of it was paid for by Mexico.

People he had no words of criticism for? Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, the January 6 rioters, or white supremacists.

“coup in search of a legal theory”

Mark Meadows, who facilitated Trump’s allegations of vote fraud, came under investigation for vote fraud himself after casting an absentee ballot from a mobile home in North Carolina where he did not live and had never even visited.

Trump, the Napoleon of Mar-a-Lago, knew little about history. But like the French emperor banished to Elba, his aspirations for a comeback could not be ruled out.

And yet Trump today might very well regain the office he lost. In a second term, many of the restraints that inhibited Trump in the first would be gone. He would have no worry about a future election, assuming he respected the two-term limit in the Constitution. The threat of a third impeachment would hardly serve as a check either, given his survival the first two times. Trump would not make the same mistake of hiring advisers who stood up to him—he would choose matadors like Mark Meadows, not obstacles like John Kelly. He would pursue vengeance against his enemies. He would politicize the courts, the Justice Department, and the military. He would challenge allies and seek common cause with autocrats. 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.

Trump, no more content than Napoleon in exile, launched his escape attempt 664 days after arriving at Mar-a-Lago.

If Trump was a demonic force, he was not a spent one.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump cheerleader and QAnon veteran with a long history of racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, was hardly relegated to the fringes; instead, she was the model of the ascendant Republican, planted firmly by McCarthy’s side and mentioned as a possible running mate for Trump in 2024.

After Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted Trump on felony charges of seeking to cover up the Stormy Daniels payment, Trump’s poll numbers with Republicans went up, not down.

Senator Lindsey Graham (right) said Trump was a “kook” in 2016 but became a close ally. “He’s a lying motherfucker,” he told the authors, but also “a lot of fun to hang out with.”