WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump has left behind many clues to try to burn the place on the way out the door.
The clues spread over a lifetime of refusal to acknowledge the defeat. They characterized a presidency marked by mourning, angry rhetoric, inflated conspiracy theories, and a kind of community of ‘patriots’ drawn from the boiling ranks of right-wing extremists. The clues piled up at light speed when Trump lost the election and refused to admit it.
The culmination of all that came Wednesday when Trump supporters, urged by the president to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” against a “stolen” election, raided the building and occupied it in an explosive manner confrontation that kills a Capitol police officer and four others.
The mob was so encouraged by Trump’s dismissal during a rally that his partisans streamed themselves alive to decay the place. Trump, they reckoned, had their backs.
It was, after all, the president who responded last year to a right-wing conspiracy to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan with the remark: ‘Maybe it was a problem. Maybe it was not. ”
Over the arc of his presidency and his life, Trump hated by his own words and actions to lose and not allow it when it happens. He turned bankruptcies into successes, setbacks in office in glowing achievements, the stain of accusation of martyrdom.
Then came the eventual loss, the election, and desperate forces that compared politicians to the practices of ‘banana republics’ or the ‘Third World,’ but were all America in the twilight of the Trump presidency.
Often with a wink and a nod over the last four tears, sometimes directly – “We love you,” he told the Capitol Hill mob as he softly suggested in the collisions that they should go home now – Trump made a general case with fringe elements eager to confirm him in exchange for his respect.
This created a flammable mixture when revenue was at its highest. The elements came together in clear view, often in missions delivered by tweet. (Friday, Twitter banned Trump’s account, who denies him the choice of his megaphone, “because of the risk of further incitement to violence.”)
“I wish we could say we did not see it coming,” President-elect Joe Biden said of the Capitol rally. ‘But it is not true. We could see it coming. ”
Mary Trump saw it from her unique point of view as Trump’s clinical psychologist and cousin.
“It’s just a very old emotion he has not been able to process from an early age – terrified of the consequences of a lost position, afraid for the first time in his life to be responsible for his actions,” she told PBS said a week after the election.
“He’s in a position to be a loser, which was definitely the worst possible thing in my family you could be,” she said. “So he feels trapped, he feels desperate … increasingly angry.”
Problems after the election were predictable, as Trump said it would all happen if he lost.
Months before a vote was cast, he claimed the system was fraudulent and had plans to vote fraudulently, using the process so relentlessly that he potentially harmed his chances by discouraging his supporters from voting by mail. He refused to assure the country in advance that he would respect the result, something most presidents do not have to do.
There was no evidence before the election that it would be tainted and no evidence of the gross fraud or serious error he and his team claimed in numerous lawsuits that judges, whether appointed by Republicans, Democrats or Trump himself, systematically dismissed showed, often as nonsense. The Supreme Court, with three judges placed by Trump, shook him off.
It did not stop him.
“I hate defeat,” he said in a 2011 video. “I can not stand the defeat.”
But the aftermath of the election ultimately left him with no setback other than his infantry, who also could not think he had lost.
Trump’s history of promoting false and sometimes racist conspiracies rooted in right – wing extremism is long.
He praised the supporters of QAnon, a complicated pro-Trump conspiracy theory, and said he did not know much about the movement “except that I understand that they like me a lot” and “it’s becoming popular.”
QAnon centers on a supposedly anonymous, high-ranking government official known as ‘Q’ who shares information about an anti-Trump ‘deep state’. The FBI has warned that conspiracy theory-driven extremists, such as QAnon, are domestic terrorist threats.
In 2017, Trump said there was a “blame on both sides” for deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of a disagreement between white supremacist groups and those protesting. He said there are “good people” on both sides.
And during a debate with Biden, Trump would not criticize the neo-fascist Proud Boys. Instead, Trump said the group should “stand back and assist”. The remark drew a firestorm and a day later he tried to run it back.
Trump did not condemn the actions of a teenager from Illinois who is accused of fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during the summer rallies in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kyle Rittenhouse pleaded not guilty to charges.
In October, he chose not to denounce people who planned the kidnapping of the government, Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. “When our leaders meet, encourage or make domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and are complicit,” she said. “If they incite and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit.”
For Mary Trump, the way her uncle’s defeat helped set the stage for the toxicity she said would happen in November earlier.
Republicans in the Senate and House races fared better than him, increasing their minority in the House and keeping their Senate majority until the two elections in Georgia this month transferred the balance of the Senate to the Democrats.
His defeat on November 3 was on him, not on the party. “So he has no one else to blame,” his niece said. “So I think he’s probably in a position where no one can help him emotionally and psychologically, which’s going to make it worse for the rest of us.”
Worse came.
Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism, called the attack Wednesday the “logical conclusion for extremism and uncontrolled hatred” during Trump’s presidency.
“If you were surprised, you did not pay attention to it,” said Amy Spitalnick of Integrity First, a civil rights group involved in 2017 lawsuits over the Charlottesville violence.
On Thursday night, after months of provocation, Trump let down a unifying message, saying in a video ‘this moment calls for healing and reconciliation’
But on Friday, he was back to take care of “his great American Patriots” and demand that they be treated fairly, and he said he would not go to Biden’s inauguration.
He acknowledged that his presidency was over, but did not acknowledge the defeat – could, perhaps never.
For all the insulting nicknames he noticed on his political enemies – sleepy, shifting, crying, corrupt, crazy, small, brain dead, crazy, pencil neck, low IQ, watermelon head, dummy, disturbed, sick puppy, low energy – no one was anymore as ‘loser’. And nothing, it seems, stung more than when the loser he was.