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Prologue
Mar-a-Lago
When Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021, a dwindling band seeing him off from Andrews Air Force Base, it was at best a loser’s fantasy that he could run for president again. In the orbits around him (family, White House aides, Republican leaders, donors), there certainly weren’t many cogent voices encouraging him in this fantasy. If you were close to him, you tended to be at best circumspect, if not mortified, on his behalf—defeat; crazy, Keystone Cops efforts to deny his loss; January 6; exile.
Most immediately, he faced another impeachment trial in the Senate and could hardly even marshal a competent legal team to put up his defense—a ragtag band of small-time practitioners was assembled only after a wide casting call. He was saved—and his ability to hold office again preserved—only by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s pity and desire to wash his hands of him. Through conventional eyes, this trial was just one more coffin nail. (Still, an advantage perhaps evident only to him, it did keep him in the news.)
His finances were in disarray. His sons, with their own livelihoods at issue, were counting on a level of calm and distance, with him necessarily out of the news, to help re-establish the brand, with hope that in a year or two or three, “Trump,” would be old news. There were several open outbursts at Mar-a-Lago between them and him, with the sons emphasizing the seriousness of the situation and the discipline that would be required. Their suggestion that he could be most valuable as an ambassador to the family’s foreign properties—Donald Trump on a permanent golfing tour—hardly sat well with him.
There were rumblings about legal threats he might face. All the more reason to keep his head down and not provoke the new sheriff in town.
The state of his mental health was a whispered concern. He really did not seem to appreciate, or grasp, the reality of what had occurred.
His chief adviser in the White House, the aide with real authority and influence, the conduit of normalcy to the extent that any existed, was his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump expected Kushner to continue in Mar-a-Lago as his right hand. But Kushner’s own clear and immediate post–White House plan was to put distance between himself and his father-in-law. Asked about his father-in-law’s future by a friend, Kushner replied, “What was Nixon’s future?” Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, for social and tax reasons, were themselves moving to Florida—but to Miami instead of Palm Beach, using new schools for their children as an explanation. Replacing himself, Kushner staffed up his father-in-law’s new exile office. But it wasn’t much of a staff: Susie Wiles, a local Florida political operative at retirement age (in a young person’s profession), took on the job more out of duty than ambition; Nick Luna, a young man married to one of Kushner’s assistants, would commute several days a week to Palm Beach from Miami; Jason Miller, a comms person in the campaign, would be on call for a few months in Washington; and Molly Michael, another of his look-alike assistants, would step in as the designated young woman attending to him (notably, Hope Hicks, his favorite young woman retainer, had fled during his effort to overthrow the election).
His wife, Melania, was straightforward about how she saw her husband’s future—or the future she did not see. She had not enjoyed a single day in the White House. To the extent that they had had a marriage (even on a negotiated footing), it was further disrupted by her husband’s mood swings and constant sense of offense and injury while in the White House. It had all been bad, in her view, for their son, Barron, and had only increased tensions between her and the rest of the Trump family. So, good riddance. She was young, her husband was old, and she had her own life to make—she felt nothing but relief that he was finished with politics (or it was finished with him).
Trump, however, simply did not acknowledge his defeat and exile. There was not the slightest indication, not the smallest opening of self- awareness, that he even sensed the enormity and finality of what had occurred since Election Day, November 3. He showed no inclination to look for meaning in the events, or to sift the experience. Nor was anyone aware of a friend or confidant with whom he might be considering the recent past and unknown future. He was not, as many defeated politicians have described themselves, consumed by a period of self-doubt and reflection. Rather, he was still, for all intents and purposes, and never breaking character, the president.
You might believe such an ongoing fantasy of, say, a despot of some minor country exiled to the South of France, surrounded by a retinue of sycophantic loyalists, seeing himself in a displaced but unchanged world. Perhaps this was similar. Most of the people around the former president in Mar-a-Lago—family, his political and Mar-a-Lago staff, the Mar-a-Lago members—were certainly humoring him. But, really, this was transparent stuff, politesse—at least in the beginning.
The central facet of his exile—alarming pretty much to all and prompting a necessary lack of eye contact among the people around him—was his continuing and obsessive focus on the stolen election. He would bring it up no matter the topic at hand. There was virtually no conversation in which he did not return to the victory that he maintained, full of outrage and certainty, had been corruptly taken from him.
Yes, the arc of history may seem since then to have bent to his delusion, but in the spring of 2021, and perhaps for most of the year after, there were very few, if any, reasonable, professional, establishment (whatever you might want to call people who live in the empirical world) voices of any political stripe who did not entirely appreciate that Donald Trump had lost the election. From his staff to his lawyers, to his family, to his cabinet, to the entirety of the Republican leadership in Washington, even to Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon—there was no way not to accept the facts of his defeat. Even extending the benefit of the doubt and granting instances of possible dispute, virtually everyone but the former president and his small support group of nutters understood that the result would not meaningfully have been changed. It was simple math.
Trump, though, was in a loop of numbers—the individual numbers in his rendition often changing, supplemented by weird “fact” sheets that he’d had his staff assemble and by articles from the right-wing press that he kept at hand, which he would spin out in conversations—a monologue, really, one that might end only when whomever he was talking to made polite and desperate excuses or from which Trump was dragged away. You could not listen to him and believe he had any understanding of even the most basic facts. Or, alternatively, you might reasonably conclude he was purposely and, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, stubbornly trying to disguise the basic facts in layers of nonsense.
He believed it, or he convinced himself he believed it, or it was a bravura performance, with no possibility that he would ever let on that he was in fact performing: There had been a conspiracy that subverted the true result, and therefore, he was still president. “A group of people within the Democrat Party working along with Big Tech and the media” had stolen it from him, he explained to a Mar-a-Lago visitor. It was “a coordinated effort.” He promised: “Names are going to be revealed.” Of course, they never were.
For a while, there was pathos here. There is hardly anyone, at least not with something better to do, who did not recognize the quixotic nature of this. But certainty has power. Unwavering certainty. Psychotic certainty, even. Perhaps disgrace, too, has special power—if you refuse to accept your disgrace, it becomes righteousness. And perhaps delusion has power. And the larger the delusion is, the more power it may have.
