The Trump White House, never a model of decorum or consistency, is in turmoil, caught in the maelstrom of a lame-duck president who seems to occupy a dangerous fantasy world — one in which he can never lose.
With 30 days to go in his presidency, Trump “is turning bitterly on virtually every person around him, griping about anyone who refuses to indulge conspiracy theories or hopeless bids to overturn the election,” reports Axios, citing “several top officials” as unnamed inside sources.
“Trump is lashing out, and everyone is in the blast zone,” Axios says. “At this point, if you’re not in the ‘use the Department of Homeland Security or the military to impound voting machines’ camp, the president considers you weak and beneath contempt.”
Loyalists recently targeted by Trump’s shotgun-blast rage include Vice President Pence, chief of staff Mark Meadows, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Plus, of course, Attorney General Bill Barr — who has had enough and will abandon his job on Wednesday.
McConnell, for years one of Trump’s chief enablers, was a particular object of the Tweeter-in-Chief’s ire. (McConnell’s Twitter handle is “@senatemajldr”.)
Trump has turned to “a ragtag group of conspiracy theorists, media-hungry lawyers and other political misfits in a desperate attempt to hold on to power after his election loss,” says the Washington Post.
Members of this unofficial advisory council include “includes a pardoned felon, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a White House trade adviser and a Russian agent’s former lover,” the Post says.
“The President is spending day after day in his White House bunker, entertaining crackpot theories about imposing martial law, seizing voting machines and staging an intervention in Congress on January 6 to steal the election from Biden,” CNN reports.
A 4-hour Oval Office meeting last Friday included volatile discussions of such possibilities, but “exploded into shouting matches as outside advisers and White House aides clashed over the lack of a cohesive strategy and disagreed about the constitutionality of some of the proposed solutions,” the Post says.
Among those at that Friday meeting were Sidney Powell, a lawyer who promotes the unfounded notion that hostile nations manipulated voting machines to flip votes for Biden; Michael Flynn, the recently pardoned former national security adviser who has called for invoking martial law to re-run the election, and other believers in various debunked anti-Trump conspiracy theories. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani took part in the meeting by phone.
There were other meetings on Monday, organized by Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), at which Trump “huddled with a group of congressional Republicans … where they strategized over a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results next month, according to several members who attended the meeting,” Politico says.
“Surrounded by the last dead-end loyalists, Trump is flinging lies and political venom like King Lear in a crumbling Twitter kingdom, alarming some staffers about what he will do next,” the Post says.
That alarm extends far outside the White House — to the Pentagon, in particular, which would be called upon to enforce election-changing martial law or the seizure of voting machines.
CNN’s Barbara Starr reported Tuesday that there’s concern among executive office staff and the military’s leadership that Trump could wield the power he retains for the coming month in “dangerous ways.”
“We don’t know what he might do,” one officer in the Pentagon told Starr. Another added: “We are in strange times.”
“Trump thinks everyone around him is weak, stupid or disloyal — and increasingly seeks comfort only in people who egg him on to overturn the election results,” Axios says.
“We cannot stress enough how unnerved Trump officials are by the conversations unfolding inside the White House.”
“I think we are seeing just how desperate Trump is becoming himself. And how desperate the last remaining rats on the ship, if you will, are becoming because of that,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Monday on CNN.
