Obituary for a Failed Presidency
One final dispatch from Trump�s Washington.

By Susan B. Glasser

Precisely at noon on Wednesday, Donald Trump�s disastrous Presidency will
end, two weeks to the day after he unleashed a mob of his supporters to
storm the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election results, and one week
to the day after he was impeached for so doing. He leaves behind a city
and a country reeling from four hundred thousand Americans dead, as of
Tuesday, from a pandemic whose gravity he downplayed and denied; an
economic crisis; and an internal political rift so great that it invites
comparisons to the Civil War.

In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared�a chaos candidate, in
the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos
President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord,
railed against a �deep state� within his own government, praised autocrats
and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized
the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a
tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves
office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval
ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in
the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent
seeking re�lection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the
House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an
unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements
in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post,
culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election
that he decisively lost.

Yet Republicans�the vast majority, that is, of those who still identify
themselves as Republicans�continue to embrace Trump and the conspiracy
theories about his defeat that the departing President has spread to
explain his loss. This, more than anything, might have been the most
surprising thing about Trump�s tenure: his ability to turn one of
America�s two political parties into a cult of personality organized
around a repeatedly bankrupt New York real-estate developer. And so we are
ending these four years having learned not that Donald Trump is a bad
man�the evidence of that was already voluminous and incontrovertible
before he entered politics�but that there are millions of Americans who
were willing to overthrow our constitutional system in order to keep him
in power, who would follow Trump�s dark lies rather than acknowledge
unwelcome truths.

I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to
remember what it was like these past four years: the early-morning tweets
firing the Secretary of State and overruling the Pentagon; the bizarre
sight of an obese, orange-haired septuagenarian President dancing onstage
to the Village People before thousands of adoring fans; the final shocking
spectacle of the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol as the President
watched it on television in the White House and put out a video telling
the rioters, �We love you.� Will we recall Trump�s strange obsessions�his
conviction that windmills cause cancer and modern toilets don�t flush
well�and also his toxic lies about more consequential matters, such as the
deadly pandemic that he compared to a bout of the seasonal flu? I don�t
know, although I am quite sure that there will be decades of efforts to
understand how the most powerful country on earth came to have a leader
who believed that hurricanes could be nuked.

This is my final Letter from Trump�s Washington. At noon on Wednesday, I,
too, will transition�to writing about the Biden Presidency and what it
means for a capital struggling to reckon with Trump�s disruptive legacy.
Reading back through the more than a hundred and forty Letters from
Trump�s Washington I wrote, what stands out in hindsight is the stalking
menace of these past few years. As Trump became more powerful and less
constrained by successive waves of White House advisers, he was
correspondingly more and more outrageous, untruthful, and unmoored from
reality. His sense of grievance and victimization escalated; so, too, did
his threats, name-calling, and public provocations. He fired the F.B.I.
director, a Secretary of State, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary,
three White House chiefs of staff, and two�or three, depending on whose
account you believe�national-security advisers. He pardoned war criminals
and boasted of complete and total vindication in the Mueller
investigation, even though it offered no such thing. He forced the longest
government shutdown in history when Congress would not fund his border
wall�all while continuing to claim that Mexico would pay for it. The lack
of meaningful consequences throughout his tenure only emboldened him
further. The disaster of 2020 was not an unexpected catastrophe so much as
a predictable crescendo.

It strikes me that the mistake, the original sin for many in Washington,
was in pretending that the Campaign Trump of 2016 was not the true Trump,
when in reality they knew there was never going to be a governing Trump,
never going to be a Presidential Trump. What he said in all those rallies
and tweets was his authentic self: foulmouthed, bullying, self-obsessed,
casually racist, and capable not only of breathtaking lies but of
repeating them over and over until they became a strategy unto themselves.
Back in the summer of 2018, I published an entire column when the
fact-checkers at the Washington Post determined that Trump had hit the
disreputable mark of more than four thousand falsehoods in his tenure. Two
and a half years later, his final tally of thirty thousand-plus is
essentially double where the total stood just a year ago. The lies were
the metastatic cancer of his Presidency. Many in his Republican base
believed them; his party leadership succumbed to their dishonest force.

In the fall of 2017, my very first Letter recounted a lunch I had with the
Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, who relayed a conversation with Steve
Bannon, Trump�s recently banished chief White House ideologist. �There�s a
bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump,�
Bannon had told Rogers. Bannon meant it as a criticism of insufficiently
loyal Republicans; Rogers saw such internal pushback on Trump as an
unpleasant responsibility. In many ways, this was the divide that would
continue through the whole four years: a Republican establishment that
loathed Trump but justified going along with him, fearing the political
costs but also fearing the potentially worse costs�for themselves and,
perhaps, for the country�of not doing so.

This was to be a running theme of the column: Trump�s frontal attack on
Washington and the struggle to see if anyone within his party could, or
would, constrain him. What started out as a question was soon answered.
The answer was no. Republicans would not. They believed that they could
not abandon Trump, that those who had tried had failed, and that there was
no political path inside their own party that did not involve fealty on
some level to him. They accepted the rewards he offered, from tweets of
praise and generous tax cuts for the wealthy to judicial appointments for
far-right ideologues who will shape the law for a generation. Many began
to remake themselves in his ruder, cruder, pseudo-populist image. From
that point forward, it was arguably not a question of whether a big crisis
would hit but how bad it would be. The converging debacles of 2020 showed
it to be very bad, indeed. But when Trump ran for re�lection on a platform
of denying the severity of the coronavirus�even as hundreds of thousands
of Americans were dying from it�the Party not only continued to back him;
it handed him the nomination unopposed. Advertisement

Through it all, Trump remained a unique combination of absurd and
dangerous. He spent much of his time watching Fox News and playing golf,
and, although he bragged that he knew more than the experts about
everything from nuclear weapons to medicine, he displayed little interest
in the nuances of governing. He surrounded himself with sycophants and was
so historically illiterate he seemed genuinely surprised to have
discovered that Abraham Lincoln was a member of the Republican Party. His
critics could never quite decide, at least not until the catastrophes of
2020 forced a choice, whether Trump was a clown or a modern-day Caligula.
Even up until the storming of the Capitol, many of even his most dedicated
critics were not sure that a man they knew to be incompetent and
undisciplined and profoundly unstrategic could wreak so much havoc on
America�s democracy.

When I asked my Twitter followers this week what stuck most with them
about the parade of unthinkables that has made up this Presidency, I
received more than three thousand replies. Though some reflected on the
disastrous, often inexplicable, policy choices Trump made�separating small
children from their families at the southern border, taking Vladimir
Putin�s word over that of his own intelligence agencies, embracing �very
fine people� on both sides of the white-supremacist march in
Charlottesville�many others cited the bizarre antics for which his
Presidency will also be known.