As he has so relentlessly in the past, Trump is fighting against being tagged with a label that he has considered toxic to his brand. He has refused to concede. “The simple fact is this election is far from over,” he said in a statement just after the election was called. He promised to fight the results in court, alleging, without evidence, that a massive electoral fraud had robbed him of victory.
Politico
We already know he won't accept any responsibility for his own failure.
For a half a century, time and again, Trump was able to fail and yet persuade the world that he hadn’t. He shirked personal bankruptcy by shunting to others the financial wreckage in his wake, fogged over defeats by insisting they were not, developed over time an armor of seeming untouchability, benefiting from people failing to act who could have held him to account — lenders, regulators, prosecutors and political power brokers. In this election, however, hundreds of millions of voters have done what all of them did not.
[...]
Normally, a president with a thriving economy builds up a reservoir of public approval and support — but Trump never did. His unappeasable need for affirmation, adoration and attention inhibited him from adding to his base of ardent supporters; it also led to the constant churn and uncertainty of his White House, as he dismissed those in the administration willing to push back and promoted the yes-men who were content to “let Trump be Trump.” [...] And his obsession with blind positivity, with image over reality, with the flouting of fact — his congenital unwillingness to share any credit or take any blame, his practically pathological commitment to putting up a tough front — all of it prevented him from demonstrating sufficient empathy to acknowledge the sweeping pain of the coronavirus pandemic that overshadowed his final year in office. In the end, the problem for Trump was “his Richter scale narcissism,” in the words of biographer Tim O’Brien.
[...]
In addition to exacerbating the country’s polarization, hastening the decline of discourse and legitimizing disreputable, illiberal elements of America’s patchwork electorate, he steered to the right for years the judiciary up to and including the Supreme Court, rolled back environmental regulations as the dire effects of climate change became more and more clear and alienated democratic global allies while currying favor with some of the planet’s most menacing despots.
[...]
To those who know him and have watched him over the years, Trump’s comeuppance at the hands of voters, narrow as it was, had an almost mythological feel. What built him up is what brought him down. What made him win, or at least claim victory, again and again, is what made him lose. He never moderated. He never modulated. He was who he was, and so he is who he is — in the judgment of the bulk of the voters of America, a failed president.
“It’s the opposite of the hero’s journey,” said Tony Schwartz, the co-author of "The Art of the Deal." Defeated by a decisive crisis — unlike the classic protagonist, though, going home unchanged.
[...]
As a young avaricious adult, he picked as his most essential mentor Roy Cohn, the vile and besmirched former aide of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Cohn, one of the 20th century’s foremost fixers and rogues, by the ’70s “had lived down his past and come into a new, preeminent present,” in the estimation of his biographer, widespread celebrity serving as “its own exculpation.” Fame for Cohn was more than a shield. It was power. “His motto,” his secretary once told me, “was any publicity is good publicity.”
[...]
Trump kept, too, more on than off, as his most indispensable political adviser Roger Stone, a Cohn protégé, a self-styled agent provocateur whose “rules” read like the playbook of a shameless cynic. Always attack. Never defend. Nothing’s on the level. The most powerful human motivator is not hope and love but hate. Better to be infamous than anonymous.
[...]
In the ’90s, he survived the specter of financial and reputational ruin, not by avoiding the onslaught of bad press but by embracing it. And the ether of his knownness is what allowed him to be reintroduced a decade later within the misnomer of the medium of “reality” TV as a decisive big business boss on “The Apprentice.”
“He made more money playing a fictional version of himself than he made being himself,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me.
[...]
The first season of “The Apprentice” was the most watched season of “The Apprentice,” the appetite for the antics dimming from there. Viewers turned him off.
Voters voted him out.
“Trump,” Mercieca said, “was too greedy with our attention.”
[...]
He was indignant that the pandemic destroyed his preferred message for reelection by crippling the economy.
[...]
“He got hoisted on his own petard,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist, told me. “He kept saying, ’I’m a winner, I’m a great deal-maker, I’m a this, I’m a that.’ And now he had not only the chance to prove it — he had the need to prove it. And he couldn’t do it.”
[...]
"He could never have avoided it[, former Trump Organization Executive Vice President Barbara Res said...] "Because it would take admitting he’s wrong. It would take asking people for help. He can’t do that — ‘Tell me the numbers, tell me what could happen if X happened’ — he never did that. And he can’t do that. Because he thinks he knows.”
[...]
“An utter lack of empathy,” Steel said. “An inability to focus for a sustained period of time on detailed questions of governance.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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