I have been writing for months that Trump would never concede and would instead fashion himself as the president-in-exile down at Mar-a-lago. I wasn’t sure whether the GOP cult would follow him, especially after January 6th, but of course they are. This piece by Politico’s Michael Kruse sees him more as a replication of the last of the Avignon popes:
The ousted leader refused to relent to reality.
Set against a backdrop of avarice and inequality and persistent sickness, distrust and misrule, the leader exploited and exacerbated societal unrest to seize and flaunt vast power—doing anything and everything he could to try to keep it in his grip. He resisted pleas for unity and calm. He tested the loyalty of even his most ardent and important establishment supporters. He was censured and then toppled. Still, though, he declined to consider even the smallest acquiescence. Besieged and increasingly isolated, he faded as he aged—but he never yielded. Some people believed he had no less than the blessing of God.
He was Benedict XIII—“the pope,” said Joëlle Rollo-Koster, a noted scholar of the Middle Ages, “who never conceded.”
Benedict, who died in 1423, was the last of the popes of Avignon, in what’s now the south of France. He was an “antipope”—in opposition, that is, to a sequence of popes presiding from the more customary hub of Rome—and insisted even as he was twice deposed that he remained the rightful pontiff. He tried to exert control from a fortress of a palace in a separate seat of power—propped up by a stubborn type of papal court, retaining sufficient political capital to pressure heads of states to pick sides, bestowing benedictions and other benefits and if nothing else gumming up earnest efforts to allay divides. Weary, irritated leaders, both religious and royal, “said, ‘You’re out, you’re out, you’re out,’” Rollo-Koster told me, “and he said, ‘No, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.’”
Six centuries later, Donald Trump, twice impeached, is finishing his first full week as a dispatched post-president ensconced in his own Florida fortalice of Mar-a-Lago—committed by almost all accounts to do from his Palm Beach perch some modern-day variant of what Benedict pulled off for decades. The calamitous, lies-laced last few months of Trump’s White House term, and in particular the last few weeks, almost certainly will make this harder—the broad corporate blowback, social media silencing and historic (and ongoing) congressional condemnation piled atop his already looming legal, financial and reputational peril.
Even so, according to dozens of interviews with Trump associates, former staffers, biographers, Washington and Florida strategists and consultants, party functionaries, Palm Beach politicos and members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is sure to try—to badger the man who beat him, to exact revenge against recalcitrant Republicans, to play a role of kingmaker and power broker, to return to his life-force rallies, to tease a 2024 comeback and to generally wreak what havoc he can on the public and body politic while enforcing fealty from his official (but contested) residence serving as his active home base and headquarters. And an early indicator of Trump’s undiminished influence: House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy—who’s gone in the span of half a month from saying Trump “bears responsibility” for the pro-Trump mob’s January 6 attack on the Capitol to saying “I don’t believe he provoked it” to asking for and receiving this week a patch-up lunchtime confab … at Mar-a-Lago.
“The new Trump Tower,” said former Trump political adviser Sam Nunberg.
“The MAGA capital,” said Christian Ziegler, the state Republican vice chair.
“He is going to essentially try to rule in exile,” said Rick Wilson, a former GOP operative in Tallahassee and a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, forecasting “a post-presidency like we’ve never seen.”
What will Trump’s post-presidency look like—and what will it do to America? There is no real precedent in the annals of the nation—and thus no real playbook for how to manage the kind of civic disruption it is likely to cause. But from history, and from people who’ve known him, it’s possible to stitch together a more-than-educated guess at what the country’s in for—a portrait of the nation’s first real anti-presidency.
The closest analog is probably the capitals of the Confederacy—and the self-evidently still unresolved aftermath of the Civil War—but Jefferson Davis never carried the legitimacy of having once been the president in the White House. And real former presidents, even the most compulsive limelight hounds, from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, historically have made themselves scarce, consciously refraining from meddling in or even commenting on the affairs of their respective successors. Trump in this regard figures to be as contemptuous of convention going forward as he was in the past five-plus years. “We’re going to see something remarkably new,” said Princeton historian Kevin Kruse. “There will be,” added Lawrence Douglas, a professor at Amherst College and the author of a book about Trump’s endgame, “this kind of shadow ex-president.”
There’s more. Oy.
He’s not going anywhere. In fact, here’s a supplicant paying a visit to Avignon: Palm Beach Annex.
