Sad Man Locks Himself in His Room

Nearly two weeks after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump is still struggling to accept that his tenure is quickly coming to an end. So instead of conceding the election, he’s spending this lame-duck period becoming increasingly petulant, holing up in the White House and firing those who dare defy him.

Business Insider reports that Trump’s hermit-like state is further corroborated by news that he has canceled his annual Thanksgiving plans to retreat to his Mar-a-Lago resort. Instead, Trump and his family will stay at the White House in a grim state of disbelief while he is parked in front of cable news and Twitter.

From Business Insider:

Numerous reports have detailed how Trump has confined himself to stew in the Oval Office and White House, relentlessly watching the news, and publicly claiming that he had won.

Trump’s schedule Wednesday showed “no public events” — the 11th day since the election in which it had done so.

Trump aides told The New York Times that the president’s “mood is often bleak,” and a White House official told CNN before the new Thanksgiving plan was announced: “It feels like bunker mentality.”

[…]

Trump believes his supporters want him to “keep fighting” the result, an aide told The Washington Post.

“He is more dug into his position than he was at the beginning,” the person said. “He thinks this is his base for 2024, and that half the country are warriors fighting for him, and that he’s got to keep fighting.”

While Trump likely sees himself as a fighter, his tweets of late have been nothing short of pathetic. Daily, Trump insists that he won the 2020 presidential election, and his tone is becoming increasingly combative. He has advanced from simply posting CAPSLOCK tweets about his election win to quote-tweeting news outlets and reporters who deny his concocted reality.

The following is a small sample of tweets the president uploaded on Wednesday morning alone:

And when Trump isn’t using Twitter to challenge the election results, he’s using it to announce the firings of those he no longer trusts: On Tuesday, Trump tweeted about his ousting of Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who got the boot after releasing a statement asserting that there is “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” In a tweet, Trump called Krebs’ statement “inaccurate.”

President Trump continues to cling on to the notion that the election was rigged against him. This is easier to accept than the idea that his poor leadership alone—especially his poor handling of the covid-19 pandemic—was enough for Americans to come out en masse against him. His millions of supporters and paid sycophants will continue to enable his worst impulses, but with each passing day, it is becoming increasingly evident that he’s little more than just another blowhard with Twitter access.