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   From: deathfortreasons@gmail.com   
      
   Obituary for a Failed Presidency   
   One final dispatch from Trump’s Washington.   
      
   By Susan B. Glasser   
      
      
      
   Precisely at noon on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s disastrous Presidency will   
   end, two weeks to the day after he unleashed a mob of his supporters to   
   storm the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election results, and one week   
   to the day after he was impeached for so doing. He leaves behind a city   
   and a country reeling from four hundred thousand Americans dead, as of   
   Tuesday, from a pandemic whose gravity he downplayed and denied; an   
   economic crisis; and an internal political rift so great that it invites   
   comparisons to the Civil War.   
      
   In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in   
   the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos   
   President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord,   
   railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats   
   and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized   
   the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a   
   tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves   
   office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval   
   ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in   
   the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent   
   seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the   
   House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an   
   unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements   
   in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post,   
   culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election   
   that he decisively lost.   
      
   Yet Republicans—the vast majority, that is, of those who still identify   
   themselves as Republicans—continue to embrace Trump and the conspiracy   
   theories about his defeat that the departing President has spread to   
   explain his loss. This, more than anything, might have been the most   
   surprising thing about Trump’s tenure: his ability to turn one of   
   America’s two political parties into a cult of personality organized   
   around a repeatedly bankrupt New York real-estate developer. And so we are   
   ending these four years having learned not that Donald Trump is a bad   
   man—the evidence of that was already voluminous and incontrovertible   
   before he entered politics—but that there are millions of Americans who   
   were willing to overthrow our constitutional system in order to keep him   
   in power, who would follow Trump’s dark lies rather than acknowledge   
   unwelcome truths.   
      
   I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to   
   remember what it was like these past four years: the early-morning tweets   
   firing the Secretary of State and overruling the Pentagon; the bizarre   
   sight of an obese, orange-haired septuagenarian President dancing onstage   
   to the Village People before thousands of adoring fans; the final shocking   
   spectacle of the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol as the President   
   watched it on television in the White House and put out a video telling   
   the rioters, “We love you.” Will we recall Trump’s strange obsessions—his   
   conviction that windmills cause cancer and modern toilets don’t flush   
   well—and also his toxic lies about more consequential matters, such as the   
   deadly pandemic that he compared to a bout of the seasonal flu? I don’t   
   know, although I am quite sure that there will be decades of efforts to   
   understand how the most powerful country on earth came to have a leader   
   who believed that hurricanes could be nuked.   
      
   This is my final Letter from Trump’s Washington. At noon on Wednesday, I,   
   too, will transition—to writing about the Biden Presidency and what it   
   means for a capital struggling to reckon with Trump’s disruptive legacy.   
   Reading back through the more than a hundred and forty Letters from   
   Trump’s Washington I wrote, what stands out in hindsight is the stalking   
   menace of these past few years. As Trump became more powerful and less   
   constrained by successive waves of White House advisers, he was   
   correspondingly more and more outrageous, untruthful, and unmoored from   
   reality. His sense of grievance and victimization escalated; so, too, did   
   his threats, name-calling, and public provocations. He fired the F.B.I.   
   director, a Secretary of State, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary,   
   three White House chiefs of staff, and two—or three, depending on whose   
   account you believe—national-security advisers. He pardoned war criminals   
   and boasted of complete and total vindication in the Mueller   
   investigation, even though it offered no such thing. He forced the longest   
   government shutdown in history when Congress would not fund his border   
   wall—all while continuing to claim that Mexico would pay for it. The lack   
   of meaningful consequences throughout his tenure only emboldened him   
   further. The disaster of 2020 was not an unexpected catastrophe so much as   
   a predictable crescendo.   
      
   It strikes me that the mistake, the original sin for many in Washington,   
   was in pretending that the Campaign Trump of 2016 was not the true Trump,   
   when in reality 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 thousand-plus 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. In 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   
      
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