Trump is ‘even more whiny, dishonest and self-absorbed’ than before he lost to Biden: New Yorker analysis

On Thursday, writing for the New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser broke down how losing the presidential election has unhinged President Donald Trump to a degree never seen before.

What exemplifies this, wrote Glasser, is Trump's new speech from the White House — which he billed as perhaps “the most important speech I’ve ever made” — and barely even touched on the pandemic at all, instead choosing to air his political grievances.

"Donald Trump in defeat, it turns out, is even more whiny, dishonest, and self-absorbed than he was before his decisive loss to Biden a month ago," wrote Glasser. "In the speech, delivered to an empty room and released straight to Facebook, for reasons that remain unclear, Trump repeated many of the election conspiracy theories, lies, and laments which he has been sending forth for weeks on Twitter and via emissaries like Rudy Giuliani. The news was that these baseless claims — the only impact of which will be to further undermine public confidence in the U.S. government — were coming directly from the President, as he stood at a lectern bearing the Presidential seal. And what words they were. The pollsters were liars. 'Detroit is corrupt.' 'Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone.'"

More reprehensible, wrote Glasser, is the inability of Republicans in Washington to muster any sort of meaningful pushback.

"Do Republicans think they have a free pass to pretend that the past four years never happened?" wrote Glasser. "Do they think they can simply return to the partisan status quo ante, complaining about nasty tweets and potential conflicts of interest, without anyone bringing up the current President? I don’t think this was what Biden meant when he said, during the campaign, that his Presidency would mark a return to normal. Meanwhile, not a single Republican senator had a word to say about Trump’s insane remarks from the White House on Wednesday, notwithstanding the President’s insistence that it was the most important speech of his tenure."

The nation, Glasser concluded, might take this behavior for granted at this point. But "when the President launches a direct attack on the most important traditions of American democracy, I’m not ready to say 'Yeah, whatever' just yet."

You can read more here.