Donald Trump is a retired president who refuses to act like a retired president. Those who follow him closely say that it is his way of maintaining the illusion that he is still in charge of the United States, only that Joe Biden and the electoral fraud orchestrated by Democrats and progressives have moved him from his seat in the Oval Office. Others think it’s the formula for keeping his supporters excited and the box office open for donations. One way or another, behaving as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama did after leaving the White House would be synonymous with acknowledging his electoral defeat in 2020. And that doesn’t cross his mind.
In this fantasy, the tycoon has transformed the ballroom of his private club in Mar-a-Lago into a sort of parallel Oval Office. It lacks the historical significance of the presidential office, but exudes more solemnity, luxury and power than any other cabinet. Memorabilia and objects from his time in the presidency adorn the huge room where he receives visitors on comfortable sofas, watches television on screens that can cast shade, is flanked by national flags and wields enough authority to shout at staff and persuade them to stay true to him. All he needs is the button with which he used to order coke at the White House, but here he does it loudly. After all, this is your home. Trump House.
They say that many of his office hours consist of permanent anger. Perhaps he suffers from a metabolic process that translates the news that assails him every morning from the front pages of newspapers and television channels into bad gestures, which he carefully reviews before leaving the house. The latest accusations of the congressional commission, which involved him in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, even if not physically, but morally, the recommendation to disqualify him for future public offices or the crimes of fraud that fall on the Trump Organization, his financial empire, they are probably behind Mar-a-Lago’s perpetual storm.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump does not write books or deliver lectures paid for by the price of Galician barnacles around the world. He neither dedicated himself to the construction of a presidential library with which to augment the archives of the national funds. Nor did he donate many of the official gifts received during his term, as is customary since they automatically become articles of political worship. He is said to have been able to carry as many as 100 boxes of gifts when he left Washington. And another bunch of top secret documents that he’s under investigation for. In this regard, the hypothesis is growing that he did not do it for specious reasons. Simply, keeping state secrets in his desk drawers made him feel more like a president.
Instead he has set up his own foundation, American First, even if his vocation has nothing to do with the peace center that Jimmy Carter created in his time or with the Obama Foundation, which the first black president of the United States he set up in Washington after leaving the White House. He and Michelle bring their experience and names to the service of this talent training and discussion group that has trained more than 700 leaders from Europe, Africa and Asia. American First is another thing. It is an organization that feeds on private funding and whose purpose is essentially to perpetuate Trumpism. Even while their guru sleeps on one coast, hundreds of volunteers continue to proselytize on the other, a scary exercise because it fuels extremism, according to its detractors.
It is in this context that Trump is unleashed. The Republican Party has not yet figured out how to resolve the aura of radicalism that the tycoon unexpectedly threw on his shoulders a few weeks ago by inviting rapper Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. It is true that the conservative leader later rebuked the artist now known as Ye, banned from the networks and dispossessed of commercial contracts for his anti-Semitic demonstrations, for bringing home a far-right reference advocating for a US government exclusively by non-Jewish and non-Muslim whites. “Kanye West really wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner was supposed to be just Kanye and I, but he came with a guest he’d never met and knew nothing about,” Trump later said.
The problem is, the damage has been done. Fuentes is a toxic figure to associate with a political candidate. It was the fateful January 6 in the Capitol where he called to “recover this country even with force”, a well-known agitator on social media, considers himself a paleoconservative and an ‘incel’, a voluntary celibate, a name that groups who love conspiracies, frustrated men and profound misogynists. His anti-Semitic views have earned him the label of a neo-Nazi, he rejects immigration, condemns abortion and argues that women and members of the LGTBI community should be disenfranchised. The ideal type of individual to scare Christmas dinner.
Lack of filters
Trump’s slippage is explained by some of his former acquaintances with the current lack of filters which, in the past, in the White House, protected him and acted as a shield against certain excesses. In his Florida office, the staff are completely submissive and devoid of institutional positions that give them authority before their boss. During his mandate, cabinet members such as Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA, James Mattis, secretary of defense who resigned almost two years later due to the radical drift of the president, or Mike Pence, the vice president who refused to go all the way fund attempt to boycott the 2020 election, it had the precedents and clout to stand up to it. Now, the only ones who seem to listen are his lawyers.
The perfect example of submission might be the day Trump wanted to make a public statement in his particular Oval Office. The White House usually has an on-call team of experienced Administration reporters in case the government or the president decides to make an unexpected announcement. But the advisers did not want to confront the tycoon to show him that in Mar-a-Lago no one waits at the door, that his interest in information is no longer the same once he is stripped of his institutional role, and they devoted themselves to call editors from all over the world to the state to try to compose an acceptable group to attend his appearance. It also doesn’t help that Trump is going it alone. In Truth Social, his social network, he snaps at will without anyone filtering his messages.
The dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes also coincided on the same days that the tycoon announced his candidacy for the Republican Party for the US presidency in 2024. Conservatives outside the extremist wing choked on the menu. Several leaders reproached him for his inappropriateness and his companies, complained about the image of fanaticism he conveys and even asked him to “throw West and Fuentes away” because “they are not the best companions”. Even so, the polls aren’t hitting it either. 17% of Americans believe that dinner with the supremacist streamer was a mistake, but 47% are neither for nor against. 40% of adults, mainly Republicans, but also some Democrats, continue to have a good opinion of him.
The rejection is evidently concentrated by progressive Americans, who see white supremacy as one of the great current threats to the United States. Even the FBI. It is the democratic sector itself that finds Trump’s symbolic concessions to QAnon incomprehensible, the conspiracy macro-organization that considers cannibal pedophile Democrats and waits for the former president to win back the White House while Joe Biden and the leaders of the center and left of the United States they are tried and executed.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with their partners, in a meeting in Mar-a-Lago in 2017 /
Outside of controversial dinners, what else is happening at Trump House? According to the American media, the former president plays golf every day in his club before going to the Oval Office. He usually sits at work after lunch. At night he appears in halls where his guests pay to dine and greet him. When he retires to his private rooms, they applaud him. Weddings and other events are also held in Mar-a-Lago. All is well with finances.
Keeping up with the political pulse
Another part of his agenda is occupied by the meetings he convenes with foreign dignitaries or officials (already at the time of the head of government he invited his counterparts, such as the Chinese Xi Jinping), businessmen, analysts, famous commentators and various referents. to discuss current affairs in the country. It is another way of feeling president, leader and, at the same time, candidate: the meetings have intensified since he presented his candidacy, which in his environment translates as an attempt to keep up to date on the political, economic and international pulse , and absorb arguments for electoral strategy.
Those not seen around the mansion are a good many of his former White House aides or those he recruited in his next phase, when he convinced many to stick with him thinking his thesis on voter fraud would be out of date. he would revalidate himself as president. During the transfer of power there was a kind of fiction in that sense. Until January 5, 2021, after all the frustrated attempts to prove the fraud and in view of the confirmation of Biden as head of government and the ongoing assault on the Capitol, the fantasy lasted. The Republican team didn’t even bother making advance arrangements or managing government grants for outgoing presidents to set up their civilian office and pay new employees. The procedures were done at the last minute. Apparently, Trump’s aides wanted to charge those funds to the Mar-a-Lago Oval Office. But it didn’t slip.
