Obituary for a Failed Presidency Donald Trump Susan B . Glasser Tallahassee , Florida February 2021
they knew there was never going to be a governing Trump , never going to be a Presidential Trump . What he said in all those rallies and tweets was his authentic self : foulmouthed , bullying , self-obsessed , casually racist , and capable not only of breathtaking lies but of repeating them over and over until they became a strategy unto themselves .
Back in the summer of 2018 , I published an entire column when the fact-checkers at the Washington Post determined that Trump had hit the disreputable mark of more than four thousand falsehoods in his tenure . Two and a half years later , his final tally of thirty thousandplus is essentially double where the total stood just a year ago . The lies were the metastatic cancer of his Presidency . Many in his Republican base believed them ; his party leadership succumbed to their dishonest force .
In the fall of 2017 , my very first Letter recounted a lunch I had with the Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers , who relayed a conversation with Steve Bannon , Trump ’ s recently banished chief White House ideologist . “ There ’ s a bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump ,” Bannon had told Rogers . Bannon meant it as a criticism of insufficiently loyal Republicans ; Rogers saw such internal pushback on Trump as an unpleasant responsibility .
Source photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty
tIn many ways , this was the divide that would continue through the whole four years : a Republican establishment that loathed Trump but justified going along with him , fearing the political costs but also fearing the potentially worse costs - for themselves and , perhaps , for the country - of not doing so .
This was to be a running theme of the column : Trump ’ s frontal attack on Washington and the struggle to see if anyone within his party could , or would , constrain him . What started out as a question was soon answered . The answer was no . Republicans would not . They believed that they could not abandon Trump , that those who had tried had failed , and that there was no political path inside their own party that did not involve fealty on some level to him .
They accepted the rewards he offered , from tweets of praise and generous tax cuts for the wealthy to judicial appointments for far-right ideologues who will shape the law for a generation . Many began to remake themselves in his ruder , cruder , pseudo-populist image . From that point forward , it was arguably not a question of whether a big crisis would hit but how bad it would be .
See OBITUARY page 24