Donald Trump’s fight to overthrow the government has grown increasingly lonely since the electoral college made his loss to Joe Biden official. Mitch McConnell is moving on, William Barr is moving out, and some of his more ambitious enablers are hoping to move up to lead the party in 2024. Angry and alone in the White House, Trump is getting more and more desperate. And as he fumes at McConnell, Mike Pence, Mark Meadows, and anyone else deemed too “weak” in declining to fight for his lost cause, he has brought fringe figures to the White House in recent days to scheme up last ditch efforts to hang on to power.
Last week it was Sidney Powell, the lawyer even Rudy Giuliani thought was a bit much, and Michael Flynn, the disgraced national security adviser who has called on Trump to impose martial law. This week, it was Giuliani and a delegation of House Republicans led by Mo Brooks, the congressman heading up a planned objection to the results when lawmakers meet to certify them next month. Among the GOP officials present for the lengthy meetings Monday was Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-adjacent congresswoman elected in November. For hours in the Oval Office, while reportedly munching meatballs and pigs in a blanket, Trump and his loyalists plotted a protest on the House floor for January 6, the day lawmakers will sign off on Biden’s victory. They also discussed the matter with Pence, who will oversee that process. Brooks told Politico he thinks he’ll be able to bring senators around to the cause; former college football coach Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s senator-elect, has signaled he may sign on to the effort. “More and more congressmen and senators are being persuaded that the election was stolen,” Brooks said.
That effort is likely to succeed only in delaying the inevitable. “It’s going down like a shot dog,” Republican Senator John Thune told CNN’s Manu Raju Monday. Trump himself has acknowledged that fact privately, according to Axios, which reported Tuesday that he has turned on almost everyone around him in the West Wing. The reason Flynn, Powell, Giuliani, and now even Steve Bannon have caught his ear recently isn’t because they’ve given him hope that the longshot challenge to the results will work—it’s because they’ve fed into his belief that, even if his legitimate paths to victory have closed, he can just forge a new one. “He is grasping at straws,” a senior administration official told the Washington Post. “If you come in and tell him he lost, and that it’s over, he doesn’t want to hear from you. He is looking for people to tell him what he wants to hear.”
He’s found a disturbing number of officials willing to do that, particularly in the House, where more than 100 GOP lawmakers and extremists like Greene and Madison Cawthorn in the incoming freshman class have endorsed his efforts. Some, like Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, have been outspoken in their opposition to the president’s open assault on democracy.
But Kinzinger is a minority in his party, which has either fully embraced Trump’s authoritarianism or been passive in denouncing it, waiting for the storm to pass. “I am counting the days until he is gone,” one of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill told ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl.
In the meantime, their silence is doing as much to keep Trump’s attack on democracy from within alive as those who are actively participating in it. And the longer this goes on, the more dangerous it’s liable to get. Right now, he has Brooks’ challenge in congress January 6 to look forward to. But what happens when that fails? Does he try to seize voting machines, as Giuliani wants to do? Or a military takeover, like Flynn is suggesting? Or does he just refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, as CNN reported he has told advisers? Those scenarios feel almost too outlandish to consider. But that’s where four years of eroded norms, a deranged president, and a cynical Republican party has gotten us. “No one is sure where this is heading,” a Trump official told CNN. “He’s still president for another month.” Said another: “It’s scary.”
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