Donald Trump, unwilling to accept his defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, has spent the past three weeks in denial. Though his crusade to shift the outcome of the 2020 race has failed, his efforts will nevertheless leave a lasting stain on public faith in America’s elections. Publicly, he has mounted an increasingly desperate effort to reverse the election results by filing toothless, conspiracy-laden lawsuits, which judges have repeatedly tossed out of court, spreading nonstop lies about widespread voter fraud, and making false declarations of victory on social media. The president’s break with reality, according to the Washington Post, unfolded behind closed doors, too, with one close adviser comparing Trump’s post-election delusion to “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’”
The president’s “devolution into disbelief of the results,” according to the Post, was aided by advisers willing to tell the president what he wanted to hear, as well as Trump’s readiness to believe it. When top aides presented Trump with a potential legal strategy during a meeting that occurred a few days after the election, they reportedly estimated a “5 to 10 percent chance of winning,” a virtually impossible quest Trump gave the green light to anyway. “You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me.” In his search for an explanation that would reverse unfavorable returns, the already conspiracy-obsessed president became fixated on the baseless claim that machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, used in Georgia and other states, had been expressly programmed to rig the election in favor of Biden. “Do you think there’s really something here? I’m hearing…” Trump would say, according to the Post.
A string of courtroom defeats caused a divide between Trump campaign staffers, as well as Republican lawyers, and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney who Trump had recently called on to helm any new post-election litigation. The promotion came as previously outspoken Trump allies disentangled themselves from the legal effort “in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations,” according to the Post. Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general and Trump surrogate who became the face of his fight to stop the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania right after the election, faded from the picture after the first week. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, another Trump ally who publicly backed the post-election legal battle early on, also went quiet as the president’s arguments floundered in court—as was again the outcome in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
Giuliani, along with Trump legal adviser Jenna Ellis and appellate lawyer Sidney Powell, were among the few willing to continue to push fraud claims for the losing candidate’s sake. The self-proclaimed “elite strike force” leading the failing legal effort were more like the bottom of the Trump loyalist barrel. “Anyone who is willing to go out and say, ‘They stole it,’ roll them out,” a senior administration official described the strategy to the Post. “Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it became clear there was no ‘there’ there,” another Trump aide said. Trump eventually dismissed Powell following one such presser, where she claimed without evidence that “Dominion voting systems…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez,” who died seven years ago. Trump thought the presentation, which involved a hair dye-streaked Giuliani, made him “look like a joke,” one campaign official said, and had reportedly already been receiving complaints about Powell’s comments—such as her claim on Fox Business that the election conspiracy involved “dead people” who’d cast ballots in “massive numbers.” As one of the president’s advisers told the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman: “She was too conspiratorial even for [Trump].”
On Sunday morning, it was Trump himself on Fox News, ranting and lying by phone to sympathetic host Maria Bartiromo, refusing to embrace the reality of his loss and even suggesting the FBI and Justice Department may be in on a conspiracy against him.
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