Trump Tells Advisers He May Not Vacate the White House

By Peter Weber, The Week

17 December 20

resident Trump was privately coming to terms with his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but he "has now reversed and dug in deeper — not only spreading misinformation about the election, but ingesting it himself," CNN reports, "egged on by advisers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis who are misleading Trump about the extent of voting irregularities and the prospects of a reversal." One adviser told CNN, "He's been fed so much misinformation that I think he actually thinks this thing was stolen from him."

Even the Electoral College formalizing Biden's win "did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory," CNN says, "but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality." Discussions of Trump's post-presidency future tend to go nowhere because Trump "all but shuts down," CNN reports. "In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, but few believe Trump will actually follow through."

"To be perfectly clear about this, Trump 100 percent will leave the White House on Inauguration Day, if not well before," Jonathan Chait writes at New York. "Even the scholars who expressed the deepest fears of Trump's intentions to undermine the system did not put credence in the possibility he could defy the outcome by simply refusing to leave. Squatting is not one of the tools in his authoritarian tool kit." But the fact that Trump thinks that's even a viable option suggests he's "engaged in more than a scheme to grift his supporters," Chait says. He's "drinking his own poisoned Kool-Aid."

If Trump does have to be forcibly removed from the White House, you can credit Bill Maher with the prediction.