Trump’s endgame comes into view

7 min readNov 15, 2020

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(CNN)In the real world, President-elect Joe Biden continues to hurtle toward his January 20 inauguration.

He named a chief of staff, his longtime aide Ron Klain (aka Obama’s Ebola czar). More here on what Biden’s pick says about his coming presidency.
He’s taking calls from more foreign leaders, although without help from the US State Department that he’ll soon oversee.
A few more Republican senators said he should begin to get classified briefings even though they wouldn’t publicly acknowledge the fact he won.

Biden’s job is going to be hard. The infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, a member of Biden’s Covid task force, suggested a possible four-week nationwide lockdown with the government covering wages and losses for many companies. “If we did that then we could lock down for four to six weeks and if we did that, we could drive the numbers down. Like they’ve done in Asia. Like they did in New Zealand and Australia,” he told Yahoo! Finance.

Biden, it was made clear Thursday, does not share that view. “His comments were not in line with the PEOTUS view,” a transition aide said, according to CNN’s Arlette Saenz. (PEOTUS is aide-speak for President-elect of the United States).

Meanwhile, in President Donald Trump’s reality. There are two stories on CNN that, when taken together, give you a good idea of what might be the current President’s endgame.

First, from Gloria Borger: What is he thinking?

As he sits in the Oval Office, you’ve got to wonder: What is the President actually thinking? Is he concerned about his followers? About democracy? About his legacy?

Nah. He’s thinking about himself, of course. One source who knows the President well makes this case: “He’s not worried about the Republican Party. He’s worried about how he can commercialize and monetize all of this.”

Monetizing his loss could include: “Post-election King Trump rallies across America (with paid attendance no doubt). Can’t you just imagine the former president claiming his rallies are bigger than Oprah’s motivational gatherings? A TV show! A big book deal, worth millions! (He’ll want more than Obama, but won’t get it.) Another run in 2024!”

Dragging out the election will help him raise money too. Denying reality is allowing the President to ask supporters for money he can use to influence them down the road.

“Right now, though, he’s raising money allegedly to fight the inevitably fruitless court battles on some imagined voter fraud. But look at the small print: The money also seeds his newly established political action committee. So while he’s telling his voters he’s fighting to stay, he’s also looking for way to fund his future endeavors when he leaves. Always looking for a way to find a buck.”

The election-denying media landscape. With Gloria’s report in mind, now read Brian Stelter’s report about the rise of Newsmax TV. Its ratings are still small compared to Fox, but have skyrocketed as Fox pushed the reality that Trump lost and Newsmax burrowed into the fallacy that Trump could still win. Stelter interviewed Chris Ruddy, the Newsmax CEO and longtime Trump confidant/informal adviser:

From Stelter’s story: Taking a big picture view, Newsmax’s sudden gains are about demand meeting supply. There is a demand for content that swears Biden is not president-elect; that Trump is not a loser; that Trump might even win a second term. Al Schmidt, the Republican city commissioner of Philadelphia, touched on the demand side when he told CNN’s John Berman: “One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true.”

AND: This is a demand issue right now. In the same way that some Trump loyalists are discovering Newsmax, some are also downloading Parler, the “Twitter-like app that describes itself as the world’s ‘premier free speech social network,’” the New York Times’ Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning wrote Wednesday. We are witnessing a further “fracturing of the information ecosystem,” caused by conservatives who can’t or don’t believe that more Americans voted for Biden than Trump.

When we asked Stelter to expand on this, he wrote: “In some ways this is a follow-up to the recent discussion about foreign propagandists vs. domestic creators of disinformation. Far-flung hackers and trolls captured the public’s imagination when in fact some of the most disruptive propaganda has been coming from more familiar sources all along. Think about Sean Hannity’s daily dose of whataboutism: His insistence that Trump fans should trust their tribe and disregard all outside sources of information has been staring us in the face for years. Newsmax is another example of this. The storylines and statements merit scrutiny but resist easy fact-checking. Ruddy, for example, said he spoke with Trump on Thursday, and said both men agree that every vote should be counted.

“The way Ruddy said it implied suspicion, like there was some sort of conspiracy afoot to stop Trump voters from being heard. But all the votes are being counted, and in fact the vast majority already have been.”

Trump’s now got it in for Fox. Consider Trump’s increasingly frantic Twitter attacks on Fox. He sent 44 tweets or retweets Thursday morning and 16 of them were either bashing Fox or promoting Newsmax or another network, OANN. Here’s Stelter’s latest on that.

Trump’s endgame comes into view

Written by vera phillips