I mentioned the new Gallup poll in my 2020 retrospective piece yesterday, musing that he would no doubt find comfort in it. I didn’t have room to talk about the fact that there was a time when Glenn Beck was the second most admired man in the world in the same survey. The Daily Beast reports:
In the midst of his building despondency, Trump is seizing on little, unexpected joys where he can find and get them. This week, Gallup announced that its public polling shows that Trump now ranks as the “Most Admired” man in the United States, ending his predecessor Barack Obama’s 12-year stretch as the most admired man. According to Gallup, that would make Obama “tied with Dwight Eisenhower for the most ever.”
The “Most Admired” man and woman surveys that Gallup conducts annually lean heavily on name recognition and national fame, and it is incredibly common that the sitting president, no matter who it is, emerges as a winner. Given that metric, it actually took Trump an unusually long time to topple Obama from the top spot, as the former Democratic president bested Trump for most of the years of the latter’s term.
To some presidents, that might come off as embarrassing. But not to Trump. According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, soon after the president was informed of how he, in Trump’s own words, “beat Obama” this year, Trump specifically instructed aides to publicly promote it far and wide.
It would be downright sad if he weren’t such an ass. Only stupid stuff like that and the idea of revenge is keeping him going right now:
As his days in office come to a close, President Donald Trump has hinted to those close to him that he’s worried his influence within Republican circles may be waning.
Fearful of party stalwarts growing comfortable crossing him, the president has pushed to keep up the pressure and plot possible revenge scenarios against potential turncoats, according to three people who spoke to him as he unwound at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere over the holiday weekend.
“Why aren’t they just listening [to me]?” one of the sources recalled Trump asking during a diatribe against prominent GOPers who the president felt weren’t fighting for him on his current battle lines: from nullifying the 2020 election outcome, to torpedoing liability law for Big Tech, to sending out $2,000 checks for COVID-19 relief.
The comments came during Trump’s Christmas getaway in Florida this past weekend and for those who heard them they were some of the clearest indications to date that the president has reached an inflection point. Outwardly insistent that he was robbed of a re-election victory, he has privately groused that too many in his party are acknowledging the reality of his actual loss and showing signs of tiptoeing away from him.
At other points during the long Christmas weekend, the president continued bemoaning the perceived lack of fealty from various elected Republicans, the sources recounted. He rattled off names such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (for being, in Trump’s estimation, a “wise guy”), and even his own VP, Mike Pence.
“He is keeping a running [mental] list of Republicans who he believes have wronged him since the election,” a source close to Trump said. “The president certainly wants it out there that he’s capable of holding a grudge, and that he has campaigned against [some] Republicans before and could do it again.”
Trump’s musings evoke a president at once eager to portray himself as mighty and tacitly fearful that his aura of political power may be breaking.
He is so dumb it’s painful. He still has tremendous power but not in terms of getting the Republican congress to do his bidding. He’s never really had that. In fact, when it comes to legislation Mitch McConnell has been running the country (or, rather, not allowing anything to get done) for the past four years. And his power as president is certainly waning. He lost the election! He’s a lame duck!
But he still controls the cult and if he wanted to put a scare into the party and exert his power he would be on Fox and OAN and Newsmax every day, calling out names. He doesn’t understand that his power is in the cult. It’s not him, it’s them.
That’s a good thing for the country and the world. He may flub his post-presidential plans simply because he doesn’t really understand how to strategically leverage his power.
The real problem is that he’s having a great, big, sad:
The president keeps insisting to his supporters that he could somehow still cling to that power—with President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C., fast approaching—through increasingly anti-democratic efforts to nullify the election results.
But privately, the president has begun losing faith in the work of even some of his most diehard surrogates and allied attorneys. Last week, Trump had informed the conspiracy theory-spouting lawyer (and former member of his legal team) Sidney Powell that he did not intend to appoint her “special counsel” to investigate election “fraud,” as the two of them had once discussed. And in recent days, he’s acknowledged to some confidants, with apparent disappointment, that Powell keeps “striking out” in court and overpromising but underdelivering in her crusade of wild allegations of a massive conspiracy, two people familiar with his admissions said.
As Trump and many of his MAGA devotees look to the Jan. 6 session in Congress for certifying the Electoral College vote as a potential last stand, the outgoing president’s already limited attention to the responsibilities of the office he holds has dwindled even further. Limited resources and attention are now being paid to even his primary objectives.
After weeks of trumpeting his administration’s coronavirus vaccine rollout as one of the crowning jewels of his time in office, Trump has tried this week to shovel as much guilt as possible onto the states for the slower-than-projected rollout. He has pushed publicly for Congress to pass $2,000 checks to Americans for COVID relief. But he’s done little to work Republicans on Capitol Hill to support the measure, save the occasional Twitter excoriation for potentially bucking him. Although his White House has gone to great lengths to pretend as if it is readying for a second term, members of his staff have quietly begun leaving.
[…]
Individuals close to Trump and several of his senior aides say that in recent weeks, the president has struggled behind closed doors to hide his feelings of loss, frustration, and disappointment. Often, he has reverted to his old habits of sheltering himself from voices of mild dissent in his own ranks, ones who would tell him to let it go with even a modicum of grace.
Trump has decided to skip his annual New Year’s Eve Party at Mar-a-lago and while he’s ostensibly coming back to DC to strategize his triumphant comeback on january 6th, the speculation is that he just doesn’t feel like mingling with people because he’s so depressed.
I’ve never understood how anyone could admire this whiny little baby. How they could stick with him after this infantile tantrum is beyond me. Nonetheless, I think they will. But he’s better stop pouting and start to communicate with them or they’ll start to fall away. I honestly can’t believe he doesn’t understand that.
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