Is Donald Trump finished?

Let’s put the elephant in the room aside, its post-election actions. If you were Mr Trump’s Twitter strategist, you would be kicking yourself right now. Assuming he can be persuaded to bring some discipline to his tweets, he’ll be on an “I told you so” roll: My vaccines are the global gold standard. I warned you about the potential for a China lab leak. I warned you about “disregard the police,” runaway urban crime, and the Democrats with their awakened racism, what they call the critical race theory.

I warned you about illegal immigration, with thousands risking their lives and their children’s to come here illegally. I offered a big beautiful doorway with a big beautiful wall. We got the border chaos of Sleepy Joe instead. Then he can reverse the post-covid job boom I have given him. And which one is eating out of President Putin’s hand – canceling arms for Ukraine, surrendering on the Nord Stream pipeline, begging for relief from the ransomware regime of terror? Would anyone have done a worse job of getting us out of Afghanistan? It has been a treason, in which America appears weak rather than strong by cunningly putting America first (the eternal privilege of being out of power is an imaginary antidote).

The elephant in the room is refusing to accept the results of the 2020 race, which has become an albatross for millions of former fans and many who have served in his administration. You don’t expect a criminal, but, because he acts that way, you can expect him to emerge with a new story about how his now acknowledged defeat was actually a moral victory. There will indeed be some driving force in this story:

I got 11 million more votes than in 2016 (he would say). I got more votes than any presidential candidate in history except Joe Biden. And it’s not because Joe Biden is Washington and Lincoln rolled in one. If the race was Biden vs Jeb Bush, do you think 155 million would have turned out? no chance. He was doing mine. Real change was on the table. Real change bothers many vested interests. It upsets the many terrified and swampy creatures who live under the “America Last” policies of my critics.

The only way Democrats could beat me (he would go on) was with every trick in the book, using the pandemic to allow wide-open mail-in voting, bringing out very low-informed, low-motivation voters. , who could have been intimidated by the media into voting for Joe. I’m still walking away from voters who voted on Election Day, who care about our country and the sanctity of the ballot box.

If you had Mr. Trump’s ears, you’d be advising him that a political goldmine lies in making this concession to a Biden victory (without acknowledging, of course, that it amounts to a concession). Mr Trump could then position himself to benefit from the inevitable Biden buyer’s remorse, which was credited for showing a strong GOP in 2022. He can also mend the fence with untold thousands of GOP voters, who have never forgiven him for his loss of two. Georgia Senate seats.

Democrats are lucky Mr Trump doesn’t have a long game. He goes from controversies to contrasts, playing tit for naught. Yet luck is working for them here as well. America doesn’t feel any less chaotic with her out of the picture. A cynic might also notice that, for all his hoaxes, Trump generally refrained from pinning himself on any specific allegation of voter fraud. It’s always “what people tell me” or “what I hear.” So Mr. Trump probably didn’t completely foresee the possibility of opting out of his post-election behavior, with some generally shameless shreds of Trump revisionism.

My own guess that Mr Trump may not run for president between now and 2024 is pretty tempting. His professional life now largely consists of paying himself for the services his companies provide for their own campaigns, funded by thousands of small donations and sales of Trump merchandise. And yet the hunger for him to serve as president again is not evident even among his fans. I also ask myself: Will he be selling his Washington hotel if he plans to be president again, will he be able to successfully reconcile his business interests with this political one during his presidency? One of the few ways?

I doubt Mr Trump has probably already decided that he will be happy to elect the next president, which explains the troop of hopefuls outside his door at Mar-a-Lago.