A President Unhappy, Unleashed and Unpredictable
President Trump remains the most powerful man in the world, but powerless to achieve what he most wants: to avoid leaving office as a loser.
President Trump returning to the White House after the Army-Navy football game earlier this month. Mr. Trump has made few public appearances in the last few weeks.
President Trump returning to the White House after the Army-Navy football game earlier this month. Mr. Trump has made few public appearances in the last few weeks.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Maggie HabermanMichael S. Schmidt
By Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt
Dec. 23, 2020Updated 3:56 p.m. ET
With four weeks left in President Trump’s term, he is at perhaps his most unleashed — and, as events of the last few days have demonstrated, at the most unpredictable point in his presidency.
He remains the most powerful person in the world, yet he is focused on the one area in which he is powerless to get what he wants: a way to avoid leaving office as a loser.
He spends his days flailing for any hope, if not of actually reversing the outcome of the election then at least of building a coherent case that he was robbed of a second term.
When he has emerged from his relative isolation in recent days, it has been to suggest out of the blue that he would try to blow up the bipartisan stimulus package, driving a wedge through his party in the process, and to grant clemency to a raft of allies and supporters, mostly outside the normal Justice Department process.
He has otherwise sequestered himself in the White House, playing host to a cast of conspiracy theorists and hard-core supporters who traffic in ideas like challenging the election’s outcome in Congress and even invoking martial law, seeking to give some of them government jobs.
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He is almost entirely disengaged from leading the nation even as Americans are being felled by the coronavirus at record rates. Faced with an aggressive cyberassault almost surely carried out by Russia, his response, to the degree that he has had one, has been to downplay the damage and to contradict his own top officials by suggesting that the culprit might actually have been China. He played almost no role in negotiating the stimulus bill that just passed Congress before working to disrupt it at the last minute.
It is not clear that Mr. Trump’s latest behavior is anything other than a temper tantrum, attention-seeking or a form of therapy for the man who controls a nuclear arsenal — though one alternative, if charitable, view is that it is strategic groundwork for a grievance-filled run in 2024.
If nothing else, it will make for an especially anxious next 27 days in Washington.
This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration officials, Republicans and allies of the president.
Most of his advisers believe Mr. Trump will depart the White House for a final time by Jan. 20. The pardons he announced Tuesday night suggest he is comfortable using his powers aggressively until then. But how far he will go to subvert the election results, actually refuse to leave the White House or to unleash a wave of unilateral policy decisions in his final weeks is hard to discern.
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Still, his erratic behavior and detachment from his duties have even some of his most loyal aides and advisers deeply concerned.
For the moment, Mr. Trump has told advisers he’s willing to stop listening to Sidney Powell, the lawyer who has appealed to him by peddling a conspiracy theory about the election, and people like Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.***, who was present for a wild, nearly five-hour meeting in the Oval Office and then the presidential residence last Friday.
The New York Times