The effort to confirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has begun in earnest, and yet, President Trump continues to shed doubt on the elections results as though, by some mechanism, he might yet overcome the title of the official loser of the 2020 presidential election.
On Monday, the Trump administration finally authorized a weeks-delayed transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner. Still, Mr. Trump continued to press quixotic lawsuits and tweeted messages of fraud and defiant resolve. His inability to concede the election is the latest reality-denying moment in a career preoccupied with an epithet: Loser.
After Mr. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States in January 2017, his administration asserted that the inauguration’s audience was the largest ever, despite all evidence to the contrary. But any suggestion otherwise would have rendered Mr. Trump a loser in some imagined contest about inaugural crowd sizes.
Now, nearly four years later, the citizens have cast their ballots, baseless lawsuits alleging electoral fraud have been dismissed and states have certified the vote. Still, the loser of the 2020 presidential election continues to see crowds that the rest of the country does not.
Mr. Trump’s career has been filled with moments that required audacious attempts to twist a negative into a positive, often by saying something over and over until it either displaces the truth or exhausts the audience into surrender.
Such behavior by the president reflects a binary-code approach to life that spares no room for nuance or complication. If a person isn’t a one, then that person is a zero.
“You are either a winner or a loser,” Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said in an interview last week. “Reality is secondary. It is all about perception.”
— Dan Barry
The New York Times