6 and even entertained the notion of a censure, Trump permitted the man he once called “my Kevin” to come to Mar-a-Lago to essentially say sorry. Weeks after the House GOP leader stated that Trump bore some responsibility for the events of Jan. He had Kevin McCarthy kiss his ring and made sure people knew it. He remained for Republican donors a fundraising colossus. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the most prominent and most vocal of the 10 House Republicans who had voted for his impeachment. He commissioned through his newly created Save America PAC a poll to gauge the extent of the backlash at home against Rep. He endorsed in her bid for governor of Arkansas Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one of his White House press secretaries, “a warrior who will always fight … and do what is right, not what is politically correct.” 6. “.A warrior who will always fight … and do what is right, not what is politically correct.” He then, though, on his first post-White House weekend, turned one threat into another, having a top political aide talk privately to Republican senators to make sure they knew the defeated and disgraced former president was not going to start a third party but also was not going to step back, was not going to fade away - that he was in fact intent on continuing to be a heavy and consistent presence in the GOP, and that they, in other words, should take that into account when weighing whether to convict or acquit in his upcoming impeachment trial. ![]() It was the first of an ongoing litany of Trump’s endorsements as a former president - fueled by his monomaniacal insistence that he won an election that he lost, fixated on the five most important states that he lost that made him lose, furious at anybody who didn’t subvert democracy by overturning those results. He backed for state Republican chair in Arizona loyalist Kelli Ward, who had campaigned on Trump’s lies of a “stolen” election. He let linger in the air an angry threat to start a third party. “In the last hundred years,” said Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian whose books include one specifically on former presidents called Second Acts, “there is nobody more politically consequential as a former president than Donald Trump.” JANUARY 1.įor a few days after he left Washington he said nothing. That was the strategy in 2016 and it worked.” “Trump,” she said, “is a genius at making everything about him. “Even Andrew Jackson in 1825, when he lost under shady circumstances in the House, did not pretend he was actually president,” Jen Mercieca, a professor of political rhetoric and the author of a book about “the rhetorical genius” of Trump, told me. And yet there remains a sense that it is not the current but the former (and the next?) occupant of the Oval Office who is somehow the one who is imposing his will, still, on the body politic and the national discourse. Biden, the man who beat him, has ushered through Congress trillions of dollars of legislation, and might manage to persuade lawmakers to spend trillions more, no small record of accomplishment in spite of setbacks and stalemates in a historically challenging time. To reengage with the reams of news coverage of Trump from the course of the last 12 months, to read and reread his statements in chronological order, is to get a visceral, dizzying reminder of the persistence, of the manic relentlessness with which he has done this and is doing it. ![]() ![]() ![]() Trump, so unabashedly unlike any other former president, simply has refused to let people not have to think about him, and what he’s doing, and what he’s saying, and what it might mean. He hasn’t written a standard memoir, but he has spent nearly every day rewriting the history of his administration, perpetuating the destabilizing fiction that he won when he lost and pile-driving a path through this year’s midterms to the possibility of a comeback run in 2024. He reasserted a constrictor’s grip on the GOP - literally attempting to engineer the face of the party by publicly picking candidates in scores of races, from swing-state senators to state ag commissioners, a New York borough president, a smaller-city mayor and a county judge. Hardening the divide in the country between those who are for him and those who are not, he demanded fealty and vowed revenge, raised and hoarded money, targeted people who want to hold him to account and touted those who don’t or won’t. A video of President Trump plays during the rally outside the White House that preceded the insurrection at the Capitol Building on Jan.
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