Donald Trump and his advisers: between denial and resignation
The president has no plans to deliver the traditional concession speech, some allies said. His campaign promised to continue electoral challenges across the country.
WASHINGTON - On Saturday morning, President Trump's caravan had just arrived at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia when the media ended its days of waiting and declared that it had lost the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The advisers called Trump to tell him that his predictions over the past few days had come true: all major media outlets were declaring Biden the winner. But the president - who an hour earlier had posted the message on Twitter: "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!" - was not surprised, they said. And he did not change his plans to move forward with legal challenges to the election results - which several of his own advisers warned him were, at best, distant possibilities - or to go play golf.
"The fact is that this election is far from over," the president said. "Starting Monday, our team will begin to process our case in court to ensure that electoral laws are fully enforced and that the rightful winner is in office."
Trump aides said the president has refused to acknowledge defeat, maintaining his baseless accusation that the Democrats stole the election.
But they don't believe the president is trying to somehow prevent Biden from taking office. They assured that if he has not delivered a formal concession speech by the time he leaves the presidency, the pressure to convince him that he must accept the inevitable and let the American people know that he accepts his decision will fall on his Republican allies, family and friends.
Even some of Trump's longest-serving advisers, like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have said publicly that he needed to have concrete proof to make the claims he's been making about the election.
“All these kinds of claims do is cheer without reporting. And we cannot allow outrage without information, ”Christie said on ABC News Thursday night.
Now that Biden has been declared the winner, White House advisers must face the reality that, for the next two and a half months, Trump will be a president with his days numbered.
Since early Wednesday morning, when Trump angrily declared the election a "fraud," he has divided his time between the Oval Office and the presidential residence, watching television coverage and ruminating.
On the phone and at the White House, the president has spoken, in addition to his children, with a group of advisers, including former White House Councilor Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, his deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, his adviser Hope Hicks and the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel.
Vice President Mike Pence spent part of Friday in the Oval Office with Trump, but the president's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who tested positive for the coronavirus the day after the election, has been working remotely on the legal challenges of the bell.
Trump's advisers succeeded in persuading Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, to retract some of his public allegations of fraud. But Giuliani appealed to Trump, and the president approved a press conference in Philadelphia that began just after the media confirmed the victory of the presidential race to Biden.
Some attendees were candid with Trump that there weren't many routes to take, even though they said the attempts would continue. Only a few allies had doubted the likelihood of Biden winning, including Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, according to people who spoke to Trump.
Trump was surprisingly calm while playing golf on Saturday, despite the news he had received when he arrived at the club, attendees said.
But that was before he saw television coverage of Biden's victory. Almost two hours after his uneventful return to the White House, Trump again tweeted bogus and angry messages insisting that he had won the election and complaining that “MILLIONS OF BALLOTS IN THE MAIL WERE SENT TO THEY NEVER REQUESTED THEM! ”.
Several Trump advisers said that while they now wanted to give the president room to process defeat, they were exhausted after four tumultuous years and were eager to be certain of what would come next.
Some advisers began to focus on what they believed Trump could cite as achievements even in defeat, including the fact that he received the second-highest number of votes in American history and that he attracted a new group of voters to the Republican Party. .
Confined almost entirely to the White House since Election Day, Trump is eager to get out of Washington and, after thinking of hosting a rally this week, his aides said he would most likely travel to his private club, Mar -a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida. But the president has no intention of ending the boisterous demonstrations of support that he has made throughout his presidency and that always seem to encourage him.
It is unclear whether Trump will continue the tradition of inviting Biden to the White House for a symbolic meeting like the one he held four years ago with his predecessor, former President Barack Obama. It is also common for the outgoing president to attend the inauguration of his successor, but Trump has ignored many of the rules of the position.
As a former vice president, Biden doesn't need the tour of the White House that Trump once did. This meeting would send a signal that could help reduce the anger of the president's supporters over his defeat, but it would be a surprisingly out of place gesture for a president who has so often sought to heat up spirits.
Democrats worry that Trump administration officials may ignore or interrupt a series of steps that are routinely involved in a presidential transition. However, the initial stages of the transition have started without interruption.
Chris Liddell, a top White House aide, has been spearheading transition planning for the Trump administration, but the president has not been involved, a White House official said, in part because of his superstitions about planning a transition before the vote and in part because officials feared he would try to meddle.
As Trump's caravan returned to the White House Saturday afternoon, crowds of Biden supporters applauded the president's departure, and Trump aides continued to show varying degrees of surprise over a contest many believed would win.
Some of those collaborators had already begun to withdraw, anticipating defeat. Ja'Ron Smith, the highest-ranking black official in the West Wing and a deputy assistant to the president, sent an email to colleagues Friday saying he was leaving. One of his colleagues said it was a long-planned departure but for others it was the beginning of a slow exodus on the way to the day of the change of command.
Trump, for his part, showed no signs of ending his hunt for fraud allegations that could lend credibility to the challenges he wants filed in various states. A campaign official said Stepien and Kushner had decided that David Bossie, the leader of the conservative group Citizens United and a longtime Trump ally, would lead efforts to challenge vote counts in various states.
Some of the president's allies in the Senate said they understood why he felt entrenched.
"I don't blame him one bit for fighting for every vote," said Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator from North Dakota.
Some of the president's donors disagreed. "President Trump should go against his nature and cancel legal dogs," said Dan Eberhart, a Trump supporter and financier who called Biden's victory "unfortunate."
But even before leaving the White House, one of Trump's forms of communication has been eroded. Twitter has become more aggressive in issuing warnings to the president's false claims about "illegal ballots" and demands that state election officials stop counting ballots prematurely.
A Twitter spokesperson, Nick Pacilio, said in a statement that the company had flagged the president's tweets "for making potentially misleading claims about an election."
"This measure is in line with our policy of civic integrity," the statement continued, "and as is customary with this warning, we will restrict interaction with these tweets."
