But with a whimper
Trump left the White House with his wife, Melania, at about 8:20 a.m., refusing to take questions from the press. He walked to Marine One with an ominous send-off: “I just want to say goodbye, but hopefully it’s not a long-term goodbye. We’ll see each other again.” Later, in a brief departure ceremony at Joint Base Andrews before flying to Florida, he gave a familiar and repetitive summation of what he views as his accomplishments in office. He of course neglected to mention the incident that will come to overshadow everything else that happened over the past four years: a lethal insurrection carried out by his supporters after a rally in which he’d again falsely claimed that the election was stolen. Trump may have no interest in revisiting the riot at the Capitol on January 6 that delayed the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory and took five lives, but history won’t forget it.
“This is the only president in American history who incited an insurrection against Congress that could have resulted in assassinations and hostage-taking and, conceivably, the cancellation of a free presidential election and the fracturing of a democracy,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, told me. “That’s a fact, and it won’t change in 50 years. It’s very hard to think of a scenario under which someone might imagine some wonderful thing that Donald Trump did that will outshine that. He did, literally, the worst thing that an American president could ever do.”
He did that and he also did very little that can be seen as “some wonderful thing.” Very very little.
Shortly after noon today, the main @POTUS, @WhiteHouse, and @VP Twitter accounts had changed hands. Twitter even created an account for Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, called @SecondGentleman. Unlike Trump, Biden is not a Twitter obsessive. A Biden transition adviser told me that the new president would not use social media as an “abusive, psychotic mechanism to display insecurity and grievances.”
Huh. De gustibus.
Meanwhile Mar-a-Lago isn’t what it was.
Many once-loyal members of Mar-a-Lago are leaving because they no longer want to have any connection to former President Donald Trump, according to the author of the definitive book about the resort.
Attempted insurrection and murder a step too far?
“It’s a very dispirited place,” Laurence Leamer, historian and author of “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace,” told MSNBC host Alex Witt on “Weekends with Alex Witt” Saturday. He said members are “not concerned about politics and they said the food is no good.”
Too many burgers.
“Even here, people don’t like him,” Leamer said, referring to residents of Palm Beach — many of whom voted for Trump in hopes of lower taxes and a booming stock market. “It’s just another measure of how his power has declined.”
They’re all gonna laugh at him.
I suspect many of those (former) Mar-A-Lago members and/or Palm Beach residents are just “turning” on him because he’s out of power and no use to them any more. Which is no less than Trump deserves, as he treats everyone else transactionally.
It’s an interesting question whether or not the GOP would have been better off had Trump never ran. I don’t think much of Cruz, Rubio, et al, but I suspect that any of them would have at least TRIED to do something about COVID had they won in 2016. Which means they might have had a better shot at a second term.
Even if they were one-termers, too, they certainly would have passed the same tax cuts and nominated the same judges.
And finally, if only Trump could have beaten Hillary in 2016, then it’s a fair question whether the GOP would still have been better off. It’s rare enough for the same party to win three presidential terms in a row; four would be hard. And Hillary would have gotten blamed for COVID (though I’m sure she would have done a competent job of handling it). So it’s entirely possible that the GOP traded four years of Hillary for at least four and maybe eight of Biden.
Again, serves them right.
Retired politicians, thanks to the contacts and networks they build and get into while in office, commonly score lucrative positions in the corporate world once retired. Maybe Trump’s wealth claims are hollow, and legal expenses will chew up a lot of his capital in the months and years ahead.
It will be interesting to see what Trump manages to get for himself. Could be that his best offer is the job of street sweeper in Dogpatch, Oklahoma.
If such should come up, my advice to him would be to grab it, with both hands. He is a well-practriced grabber; should be a piece of cake.
Omar, they don’t sweep the streets in Dogpatch. They might rake the forests, though.If they have any.
I wonder how many of his oh-so-loyal capitol protesters could comfortably afford to be a member of Mar A Lago. Maybe the resort will succumb to Trump’s most successful business model to date — bankrupt the place and stick someone else with the bill.
In other news, Trump needs to be careful of how high he builds his gold plated statue of himself down there, it could be a hazard to low flying aircraft. :D https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-mar-a-lago-sky-banner-pathetic-loser_n_600e18a4c5b6fe97669d9336
I have a tiny smidgin of sympathy for Melania Trump in that when she married Trump she thought she was going to marry a blowhard billionaire property dealer, sex pest and reality TV star, and would take long lunches and sun herself on yachts. She hadn’t bargained for being a First Lady with its uncongenial duties.
Hmmmm. I have to say that account doesn’t elicit a tiny smidgen of sympathy from me. A tiny smidgen of vindictive cheer maybe? Yes, closer to that.
Not even a teeny weeny smidgen? Oh all right, you hard-heart.
I’m terrible. Not only no smidgen, but instead the other thing. She married the worst human in the world because $$$$.I want her to be miserable. I would like to see both the queen and the princess have to clean other people’s houses for the rest of their lives.
twiliter@4,
My recollection is that dues at Mar-A-Lago are pretty high, so very few people in any group would be able to afford that.
But, and I may be saying something you already know, the insurrectionists were hardly some economically downtrodden group. These were people who could afford to take time off work, fly to D.C., stay in a hotel, and prance around in many cases with body armor and weaponry that cost thousands of dollars. We know that many of the people who have been arrested so far were lawyers, real estate brokers, etc. or the spouses or children of such people.
A lot of punditry on this subject gets confused because it’s true that Trump does better among people with less education, and of course in general there’s a correlation between education and income, and certainly the GOP likes to promote the notion that Trump supporters are all unemployed steelworkers or whatever who have economic grievances against “the elites.” But Trump’s base contains a lot of folks who make good incomes even without college degrees, and a lot of their grievances are cultural, not economic.
Yeah, Screechy, and the GOP plays on that a lot. But they have so many high end supporters that the average income of Trump voters was higher than that of Clinton voters…and the education of Clinton voters was higher.
Which just tells us you’re better off being born rich than going to college if you want to be rich. And that billionaires hang around with other billionaires. I imagine neither thing surprised any one here.
I can’t find the common denominator in Trumpies, other than I can’t relate to them, which is probably why. He is so obviously what he is (add your descriptors), what anyone sees in the stupid asshole is beyond my (admittedly limited) comprehension of people.
twiliter, if there is a common denominator then I suspect that it may be a ‘give me mine, fuck everybody else’ selfishness.
What appears to me as a common denominator is at least a trace of white supremacist; don’t like black people, don’t like brown people, don’t like anyone who doesn’t look like them. Plus, a distaste for paying taxes, but they could get that from other GOP candidates. Cruz and Rubio are both “the other”, for instance. Although Romney is lily white, he is a Mormon. Plus, Trump is really the only candidate I’ve seen in recent years (at least major candidate) who is willing to call people nasty names, shout mean things at the disabled, at women, and at minorities. For some reason, all these white, mostly men but too many women, think that women, minorities, and the disabled have tons and tons more than they do. Probably because they fail to understand the basics of mathematics, data collection, and reality.
All the Trump supporters I know in any depth think that way. And all of them are solidly middle class, and have much more power and wealth than the bulk of the people they despise for having more than they do. I do know a lot of poorer Trump supporters, but I do not know them well enough to have a sense of why they are Trump supporters, but for those who fly Confederate flags on their pickups or wear the Confederate flag on their jackets, I think I can probably guess.
Hell, either of them would probably consider having to clean their own houses cruel and unusual punishment.
Melania must be worried how Donald is going to pay the divorce settlement once he’s bankrupt (again) and jailed (at last).