Report: Trump Has Fully Lost It, Won’t Stop Telling People He’s Going to Be President Again This Year - Vanity Fair

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After he overturns the results of the election, which he legitimately thinks is going to happen. 

By Bess Levin

June 3, 2021

What do former presidents do with all the extra time on their hands after leaving office? Bill Clinton focused on Clinton Foundation initiatives. George W. Bush got into painting. Barack Obama wrote a memoir, started a production company, and devoted time and energy to the Obama Foundation. Then there’s Donald Trump. Never once accused of playing with a full deck when he was in office, the 45th president appears to have fully and completely lost his mind since departing the White House, the evidence being that he has apparently become singularly obsessed with overturning the results of the 2020 election, i.e. the one he lost.

After New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote that Trump has been “telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August”—which would suggest he’s planning a coup, as ex-presidents aren’t simply “reinstated” months into their successor’s first term—The Washington Post reports that Trump has grown “increasingly consumed with the notion that ballot reviews pushed by his supporters around the country could prove that he won.” While some of his advisers have reportedly pleaded with him to drop the matter—probably because the whole thing makes him sound like an unhinged, dangerous lunatic possibly engaging in treason—Trump has “rebuffed” their calls, instead, according to the Post, “fixating on an ongoing Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona and plotting how to secure election reviews in other states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Georgia.” He is apparently “most animated by the efforts in Fulton County, Ga., and Maricopa County, Ariz.,” according to two advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity and, as my colleague Eric Lutz wrote last month, is “pushing for other states to use the partisan proceeding [in Arizona] as a blueprint to undermine the 2020 results.” Like Haberman, Post reporters Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman have been told that Trump has “become so fixated on the audits that he suggested recently to allies that their success could result in his return to the White House this year,” according to people familiar with the remarks he has made.

While Dawsey and Helderman note that some advisers insist the comments about becoming president again in a matter of months “appear to be just offhand musings,” one might argue that when someone is actively trying to prove that he didn’t lose the election, any suggestion that he might “return to the White House” soon should be taken seriously—as indication of a complete and total breakdown. (In fact, at least one person thinks he should be “investigated for seditious conspiracy immediately.”) Even if Trump wasn‘t obsessed with baseless election fraud, the whole thing would still be deeply worrisome, just as it would be worrisome if Clinton, Bush, or Obama were heard “musing” about suddenly becoming POTUS again.

Of course, Trump isn’t the only one currently trying to undermine democracy. More than a few of his craziest supporters are as well. Per the Post:

Trump’s interest has been fueled by conversations he has had with an array of figures who have publicly touted false claims of election fraud. Among them, according to advisers, is Christina Bobb, a host at the One America News network who has privately discussed the Arizona audit with the former president and his team; Mike Lindell, the chief executive of the company MyPillow; and Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R), who urged the state’s congressional delegation to reject Biden’s victory there last fall. Trump’s deepening preoccupation with post-election audits has created a singular situation, one in which a former president is regularly attacking the electoral legitimacy of his successor. At the same time, some of his most devoted supporters have intensified their own rhetoric, making allusions to undemocratic actions that could result in Trump’s return.

Which is legitimately scary given that little insurrection Trump’s rank-and-file followers engaged in last January.

The escalating rhetoric by the former president and his backers shows that he is intent on keeping alive the falsehood that the 2020 race was rigged, a claim that critics say has perilous implications for the country and the public’s faith in how they select their leaders. Trump’s campaign against the election continues nearly five months after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, seeking to prevent the formalization of Biden’s win. And public surveys show that the lie about the election has taken root inside the Republican Party: A CNN poll in April found that 70 percent of Republicans said they did not believe Biden had won the election legitimately.

Local officials in states where Trump supporters are pushing for ballot reviews have decried the attacks on the election results as dangerous. In Arizona, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who defeated an incumbent Democrat in November, said he believed state GOP leaders knew that the claims of electoral fraud in the state are “facially laughable.” Still, he said in an interview, “ordinary people, the ones who are showing up on a Wednesday night at a political meeting, I believe they really believe it. And that’s super sad.”

“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” Richer tweeted last month. “As a party. As a state. As a country.”

But indulging in insane lies is Trump’s thing, like sailing and pottery are other people’s things, so:

Trump has ramped up his public statements about the election in recent weeks and is expected to continue his crusade this weekend in a speech in North Carolina and at various summer rallies that are slated to begin this month. “Great work is being done in Georgia revealing the Election Fraud of the 2020 Presidential Election,” he said in a statement Monday, adding: “The Left talks about election security but they do not practice what they preach because they are afraid of what might be found.”

Advisers say he voraciously watches any television coverage he can find of the Arizona recount and reads “everything he can get his hands on” about the audits, according to one person who speaks to Trump frequently. And he has made supporting his claims of a stolen election—or at least remaining silent about them—a litmus test of sorts as he decides whom to endorse for state and federal contests in 2022 and 2024…. Trump’s fixation with the process has led his supporters to embrace the notion that the Arizona audit could be a “first domino” to fall in a process of putting Trump back in the White House, and his allies have been pushing for Arizona-style audits in other communities.

In recent weeks, the ex-president has reportedly become “most interested” in the possibility of an election audit in Fulton County, Georgia, despite the fact that one is extremely unlikely to occur. He’s also scheduled to make a video appearance at a June 12 rally hosted by Lindell, for which he has been billed as the “REAL” president. According to the Post, Trump “regularly moves the topic back to the election when advisers try to focus on other issues,” and will say things like, “Everyone is talking about Arizona.” He reportedly brings up the audits at random Mar-a-Lago galas; will ignore speeches written for him that do not reference the 2020 election, ad-libbing about bullshit claims of fraud; and refuses to entertain the idea that he actually lost. Anyone who tells him as much, one adviser told the Post, “is p------ into the wind.”

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One more time for the cheap seats

Just in case it was unclear, our batshit ex-president really and truly believes he’s somehow going to become POTUS again soon, according to yet another account of his delusions. Per the National Review:

I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he—along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally—will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed…. The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government. There is no Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. Hell, there is nothing even approximating a Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. The election has been certified, Joe Biden is the president, and, until 2024, that is all there is to it. It does not matter what one’s view of Trump is. It does not matter whether one voted for or against Trump. It does not matter whether one views Trump’s role within the Republican Party favorably or unfavorably. We are talking here about cold, hard, neutral facts that obtain irrespective of one’s preferences; it is not too much to ask that the former head of the executive branch should understand them.

Just how far out there is Trump’s theory? Consider that, even if it were true that the 2020 election had been stolen—which it is absolutely not—his belief would still be absurd. It could be confirmed tomorrow that agents working for a combination of al-Qaeda, Venezuela, and George Soros had hacked into every single voting machine in the country and altered the totals by tens of millions, and it would remain the case there is no mechanism within the American legal order for a do-over of any sort. In such an eventuality, there would be indictments, an impeachment drive, and a constitutional crisis. But, however bad it got, Donald Trump would not be “reinstated” to the presidency. That is not how America works, how America has ever worked, or how America can ever work. American politicians do not lose their reelection races only to be reinstalled later on, as might the second-place horse in a race whose winner was disqualified. The idea is otherworldly and obscene.

In other words, Trump belongs in a padded cell, and every day that goes by in which a pair of orderlies don’t escort him off the Mar-a-Lago golf course and into an unmarked van where he’s sedated while screaming, “Take me to the White House! I’m the real president! Call Rudy, he’ll tell you!” is a threat to national security.

Nothing to see here, just another account of the Trump administration spying on journalists

Apparently it was their thing. Per The New York Times:

The Trump Justice Department secretly seized the phone records of four New York Times reporters spanning nearly four months in 2017 as part of a leak investigation, the Biden administration disclosed on Wednesday. It was the latest in a series of revelations about the Trump administration secretly obtaining reporters’ communications records in an effort to uncover their sources. Last month, the Biden Justice Department disclosed Trump-era seizures of the phone logs of reporters who work for The Washington Post and the phone and email logs for a CNN reporter.

The department informed the Times that law enforcement officials had seized phone records from Jan. 14 to April 30, 2017, for four Times reporters: Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau, and Michael S. Schmidt. The government also secured a court order to seize logs—but not contents—of their emails, it said, but “no records were obtained.” The Justice Department did not say which article was being investigated. But the lineup of reporters and the timing suggested that the leak investigation related to classified information reported in an April 22, 2017, article the four reporters wrote about how James B. Comey, then the FBI director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential election.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, denounced the actions of the Trump administration, saying in a statement: “Seizing the phone records of journalists profoundly undermines press freedom. It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing.” Referring to Joe Biden’s insistence last month that he would not allow the DOJ to take such steps on his watch, Baquet added: “President Biden has said this sort of interference with a free press will not be tolerated in his administration. We expect the Department of Justice to explain why this action was taken and what steps are being taken to make certain it does not happen again in the future.”

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