Donald Trump has spent the nearly three weeks since his election loss to Joe Biden trying to save face with desperate, dead-end claims of a rigged election and licking his wounds on the golf course. The presidential pity party continued on Thanksgiving, as he took questions from reporters for the first time since his defeat. Speaking to the press from behind a comically small desk in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, with an undecorated Christmas tree by his side, Trump went on an unhinged tirade, going on and on about the “massive fraud” he says swung the election to Biden and lashing out at journalists who questioned him.
“Don’t talk to me that way,” Trump bawled at Reuters reporter Jeff Mason in response to one query. “You’re just a lightweight…I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.”
That outburst about summed up his Thanksgiving presser, where he gorged on grievance and served up extra helpings of lies and reckless attacks—including against one-time allies like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a pro-Trump Republican he once endorsed, whom he condemned Thursday as an “enemy of the people” for doing his job and certifying the election results in Biden’s favor. But while the president continued to insist his hilariously inept fight to overturn the election results will eventually succeed, he did, for the first time, say he would leave the White House of his own volition after Biden’s victory becomes official in the Electoral College. “I will,” he said. “And you know that.”
That, and his admission that “time isn’t on our side” in his coup attempt, is probably about as close to a concession as we’re going to get out of Trump. “It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede because there was massive fraud,” he told reporters. Because it is essential for his political project and for his psyche that he and his supporters believe that, he will take that line to his tombstone. But even as he raged against the dying of the light Thursday, he sounded like a man utterly defeated—hitting out at whomever’s around in hopes of keeping the bad thoughts at bay, struggling mightily to keep his own convoluted conspiracy theory straight. “If the media were honest and big tech was fair, it wouldn’t even be a contest,” he said. “And I would have won by a tremendous amount. And I did win by a tremendous amount.”
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