You can take it to the bank.rump, unloved by his father, has spent his entire life craving public adulation and attention and possesses a unique—almost algorithmic—understanding of how to maximize the spotlight shining on himself. Almost everyone agrees he seems likely to want to remain in the public eye—setting up a novel circumstance where a new president might assume office while being critiqued publicly minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour by his predecessor.
Politico
And that's probably where he can do the most damage to Biden's presidency. I hope Biden understands that.As he leaves office, Trump would have the chance to decide how and where to set up his post-presidential life—and where to direct a spigot of taxpayer dollars that will continue to flow to him for the rest of his life. Former presidents are eligible for a range of taxpayer-paid benefits, including a roughly $200,000-a-year pension for life, about a million dollars a year for travel and office expenses, and so-called franking privileges, the ability to send mail postage-free. The law does stipulate that such offices have to be inside the U.S., so that would prohibit Trump from using the funds to set up his office in, say, a nonextradition country.
Trump would even have the right to use a special government-owned townhouse on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, reserved exclusively for former presidents visiting Washington, although it seems hard to imagine Trump forgoing the chance to stay in his own hotel just down Pennsylvania Avenue.
He’ll also inform the Secret Service what homes and offices he’ll want secured on an ongoing basis as a former president. Unlike other former presidents, Trump could presumably direct much of the spending intended to protect him back to his own properties and own businesses, just as he’s done while in office—charging the Secret Service $17,000 a month for a cottage at his Bedminster golf course, $650 a night for his room at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and even $130,000-a-month for the military to run a command center out of Trump Tower in New York, a place he’s rarely visited at all as president. The Secret Service even paid $179,000 to rent golf carts and other vehicles this summer at his New Jersey resort.
Where Trump will set up “home” is an open question: He moved his voting residence from New York to Florida last year—so it seems unlikely he’ll return to set down roots in Manhattan—but in converting the 17-acre Mar-a-Lago into a private club, he agreed years ago that he couldn’t live there year-round and the club closes for the unpleasant Florida summer, so he’ll have to find a second home elsewhere. If he declares that he’ll be living permanently at some combination of Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower in New York, and the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Secret Service might well be paying millions of dollars to the Trump Organization for years to come.
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Trump’s ambitions for his library seem likely to exceed past imagination; presidential libraries and their associated centers usually are arranged as nonprofits or have related foundations that support the government-paid work of the National Archives and Records Administration, which technically runs the library and archives. Most see a few hundred thousand visitors a year.
“As a matter of ego, you can imagine why it would be in his nature to have it be the biggest, largest, goldest and most visited presidential library—more theme park than library.”
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Trump could easily re-imagine the very essence of such an endeavor, turning his presidential library into a for-profit arm of the Trump Organization that becomes a mecca for his devoted MAGA fans the country (and world) over—a “Trumpland” Florida tourist attraction to rival Disney, SeaWorld or Universal Studios, complete with regular guest appearances from his family members, live broadcasts from Trump’s own media endeavors and no shortage of Trump-branded merchandise.
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A grand undertaking like a presidential library might also allow some opportunity for self-dealing—think Trump choosing to put his library on land he already owns and then overpaying himself for it—and given the Trump family’s propensity for misdirecting charitable funds and the bizarre ways that tens of millions of dollars disappeared into his overfunded inaugural and reelection campaign funds, fundraising for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library would seem to present a unique opportunity for further enrichment or payments to family members.
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It’s not hard to imagine similar—and worse—disputes arising between professional archivists and historians and Trump loyalists over how the “Russia Coup” and the “perfect” Ukraine call will be portrayed in official history, not to mention Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic—all another reason that Trump may abandon the traditional model to tell his own story in his own way.
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“He should go where his genius takes him,” says one expert. “He’s a genius about attention. Where is that most easily monetized? He’s a man in constant need for attention and exceptionally good at commanding and holding it.” Rumors have long circulated that the Trump family would try to build its own media empire.
But many around Trump doubt that’s where his ambitions truly lie. Starting a media company would be tremendous work and capital intensive, and unless he was set up as the front man for deep-pocketed investors willing to do the heavy lifting, it hardly seems like the type of project a man who spent nearly a year of his presidency golfing would take up.
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“Whatever he does, he’ll be a bad actor in the media environment,” says one political observer. “Even if the Republican Party abandons him and says ‘Trump who?’ he still has enormous reach to people who are disaffected and violent. ‘Stand back and stand by.’ I’d imagine he’d want to stay public in the same way he did with birtherism—but dialed up a notch. He wants to be relevant. He’s been very successful creating this dark and chaotic political environment. That makes him powerful even if he’s not holding office.”
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“It’s Rudy on steroids in terms of introducing disinformation.”
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The simple truth is that six-figure speaking gigs probably wouldn’t get Trump where he needs to be financially; the Trump Organization will need to be prioritizing seven-, eight-, and even nine-figure business deals. As Trump surveys his earning opportunities, it seems almost certain that—as troubling and stubborn as he may prove in domestic politics—his real chance to upend presidential tradition and American government lies overseas, the place where his richest business deals are likely to go down, too.
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Once he leaves office, there’s nothing to stop him from entering into lucrative and questionable business deals the world over—and he’d likely find a certain type of country or company all too eager to engage with him. “His mischief is much more international than national as an ex,” says a former senior Trump administration official. “There’s nothing [about leaving office] that diminishes his utility as an instrument of a foreign power.”
This should be a major concern. He may not have been paying MUCH attention during his daily briefings, but I think it's a given that if there was anything in them that he may have seen as something that would profit him, he filed it away.Look for Trump to be wooed not by the nation’s top adversaries or allies, but instead by the secondary and tertiary global powers who want the imprimatur of U.S. recognition and respect and are willing to roll out the red carpet for state-visitlike celebrations, perhaps all under the guises of fancy ribbon-cuttings of new Trump-branded projects.
Intelligence professionals can envision, for instance, Trump standing on the world stage alongside his favorite global strongmen—say Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—bragging about his new joint development deals and the world leaders willing to host him even as they reject entreaties from President Biden. Think “Trump Tower Damascus will be a new start for my peace-loving friend Bashar al-Assad.” Or even imagine Trump, Rodman-style, turning up courtside at North Korean basketball games with his buddy Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang, just as Joe Biden turns up the pressure on the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear program.
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“Undermining our will, effectiveness and attempts to reassert our values and effectiveness? He’d be 100 percent willing to mess with that 100 percent for personal gain and continued notoriety,” says a former Trump administration official. “Imagine you don’t have Jimmy Carter out there doing your bidding, you have Donald Trump sitting down with these guys and offering them a stage to sell themselves.”
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“He could become the best friend, underminer, impediment to reestablishing any kind of normalized relationships the United States seeks in the future. He’s able to be there offering a different perspective. You’ve now created in him a negative-pressure relief valve,” says the former Trump administration official.
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Most helpful to America’s adversaries overseas, though, would be that Trump’s ongoing tweeting and public appearances would simply serve as a constant reminder of America’s political instability.
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There does not appear to be anything beyond a sense of patriotism that would stop a former president from offering up the nation’s geopolitical, surveillance and intelligence secrets to the highest bidder and signing, say, a $10 million-a-month consulting deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—a regime Trump has assiduously courted in office while brushing aside its most egregious actions, like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. In certain ways, he could even use his final weeks and months in office to aid certain foreign countries that promise to pay him or his company later.
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[I]ntelligence leaders and officers who have been around him in the White House doubt he’s paid enough attention to details or retained enough information to be that useful in turning over secrets. “He really doesn’t know that much,” says the former Trump official. “I don’t really believe he’s got the depth of knowledge to go explain to a foreign power the level of penetration that the NSA has gotten into various systems. I don’t think he can undermine the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence. He doesn’t know enough with enough fidelity to be actually destructive.”
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“In the 8-year-old kid that inhabits him, the things that would stick with him are details that he would think are neat or powerful,” assesses one former counterintelligence officer.
No shit.As president, Trump has surely learned secrets worth literally trillions of dollars—information about U.S. espionage capabilities, intelligence assets on earth and in outer space and nuclear and war plans, as well as the quirks, perversions and predilections of leaders and politicians the world over. Normally, former presidents have remained tight-lipped about these secrets after leaving office, but that’s more about tradition, integrity and their own sense of duty than it is about the law. It would pose an uncertain legal question whether such freedom to share secrets continues on post-presidency. While the technical answer would almost certainly be “no,” the sensitivity of prosecuting a former president would make the bar enormously high—and presumably require a deeply egregious (and known) violation of government secrecy to even consider any action.
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As a former intelligence leader says, “His ability to lobby for the Saudi nuclear deals or Goya beans, if it’s got a dollar sign attached, he’ll try for it.”
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Trump’s ascendency since 2016 has dramatically rearranged the ranks of the Republican Party in Washington and nationally; roughly half of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 at the start of his term are already gone or retiring. Any sort of broad loss on Tuesday would further wash away the very swing districts and candidates most inclined to move beyond Trump, leaving just the most solidly Republican districts—GOP areas where Trump’s approval ratings remain sky high and whose representatives would conceivably be the last to risk abandoning him. Republican candidates even far down the ballot are competing over who loves Trump more, and Trump’s scattershot approach to policymaking and betrayal of long-held conservative beliefs means the only ideology that unifies his party today is adulation of him (and, perhaps, the QAnon conspiracy theory).
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In that sense, it’s possible that the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race would actually be the most MAGA-friendly GOP primaries yet, conducted almost entirely on a stage designed by Trump himself, with supplicants parading through Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and an entire generation of GOP stars molded in his image. And that’s even before considering the Trump family’s direct influence—say a titanic Ivanka vs. AOC campaign in New York for Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat in 2022 or Donald Jr.’s campaign for Congress (or even the presidency) in 2024, as he becomes the next-generation MAGA standard-bearer.
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When Kate Andersen Brower interviewed Trump in the Oval Office for her new book on former presidents, Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump, he fully admitted he expects to be ostracized by his predecessors. “I don’t think I’ll fit in very well,” he told her. “I’m a different kind of president.”
Not enough.[I]t’s hard to imagine him hitting the state-funeral circuit as a former president. Nor does it seem likely that he’ll pursue humanitarian projects, akin to the Carter Center or the Clinton Foundation, or invest his time in mentoring future generations of leaders and Americans, as the Obamas do, or tending privately to causes like wounded warriors, as George W. Bush does.
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Whenever—and if ever—Trump becomes a former president, he will pursue the job just as he’s pursued being president itself: On his terms, answering only to himself and keeping his own counsel, reinventing almost every aspect of what Americans think of the office and its traditions. As Brower says, “President Trump is an island.”
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What if Trump wakes up each day attempting to explicitly—not just passively—undermine a Biden domestic policy at home and foreign policy overseas? He could go as far as even appointing his own “shadow cabinet,” fundraising off his aggrieved fan base as they underwrite his most loyal aides like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, who would also be out of office alongside Trump and casting about for how to chart their own political futures. They could hold their own political meetings, press conferences and appear every night on Fox News to stir the national political pot.
Rather than being able to focus on combating the pandemic and restarting the economy, Biden could find himself consumed on a daily basis by responding and batting away Trump’s latest conspiracies and complaints, and the nation consumed by an unprecedented roiling, low-grade political insurgency unlike anything the country has ever experienced. One open question, though, is how much hold does a defeated Trump end up having on the nation’s attention as time goes by? What seems wild on January 21 might become background noise by late February. As one media expert said to me: “The question is how much people stop listening to him?”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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