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Political Memo
A First for an American President, and a First for Donald Trump
In the final moments of his presidency, Mr. Trump is confronting an unfamiliar fate: He is being held to account as never before for things he has said.
When President Trump faced (and overcame) the gravest crisis of his first campaign, he defended his boasts of sexual assault on the “Access Hollywood” tape as ultimately harmless gabbing. “Locker room talk,” he said, nothing to dwell on.
When the president faced (and overcame) impeachment in 2019 after pressing the Ukrainian president to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., he insisted it was merely an innocuous case of two guys talking. “A perfect call,” he said, not a high crime.
And when Mr. Trump leaves the White House no later than Wednesday — amid the impeachment sequel and uncommon comeuppance he has encountered since inciting a riotous mob in Washington on Jan. 6 — he will surrender a valued perk: an executive phone system, he once enthused, that made it feel as though his words would self-destruct before they became self-destructive.
“The world’s most secure system,” Mr. Trump marveled in a 2017 interview during his first week in office, observing that no one was listening in and recording. “The words just explode in the air.”
Poof. Gone. Just as he likes it.
For most of Mr. Trump’s 74 years, the relationship between his words and their consequences has been fairly straightforward: He says what he wants, and nothing particularly durable tends to happen to him.
But in the final frames of his presidency, Mr. Trump is confronting an unfamiliar fate. He is being held to account as never before for things he has said, finding his typical defenses — denial, obfuscation, powerful friends, claiming it was all a big joke — insufficient in explaining away a violent mob acting in his name.
Aides could not do it for him, anonymously offering more palatable accounts.
Allies could not argue that he had been misunderstood.
His own words were all anyone needed to hear on this one.
In almost certainly the most expansive series of penalties he has incurred in his life, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account has been banned, his business brand badly dented, his presidency doomed to the historical infamy of a second impeachment. His largest lender, Deutsche Bank, is moving to create distance from him. His New Jersey golf club was stripped of a major tournament. Some once-reliable Republican congressional loyalists are revisiting their commitment, threatening his grip on the party, even as the president’s popularity with much of his support base remains undimmed.
Those who have known and watched Mr. Trump across the years cannot shake the irony of a president felled by the very formula that powered his rise: inflammatory speech and a self-regard that has congealed at times into functional self-delusion.
He has never considered words to be as significant as actions, or even in the same category of prospective offense. Words were whatever got him through the next interaction, people who worked with him say. Words were not deemed important enough to invite serious trouble.
So well-developed were Mr. Trump’s survival instincts, in theory, that he had all but perfected the art of semi-plausible deniability — an upside of being on seemingly every side of every major political issue at various points in his adult life.
Hadn’t he said the right thing that one time? That was what he meant.
Hadn’t he winked at the crowd a bit? Everyone takes him too seriously.
Hadn’t he used the word “peacefully” one time in that address before the Capitol riot, tucked between the more dominant instructions to “fight” and “show strength” and “go by very different rules” as he whipped up anger against elected officials, including his own vice president, who were disinclined to subvert the will of the electorate?
“He has had a habit of saying outrageous things and then saying he was being sarcastic, he was kidding, that people shouldn’t take him literally — and in fact, if you do, what an idiot you are,” said Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family. “It’s both deniability for himself, but it’s also deniability for his followers. He gives them something to hold onto so that they can then continue to believe in him.”
But Mr. Trump, and much of the political class that was shocked and disoriented by his 2016 win, has sometimes conflated his reputational resilience with a notion that nothing he says can hurt him, no matter how ostensibly damaging.
His term has been pocked with episodes, from his equivocation on white supremacy after the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., to his downplaying the unambiguous risks of Covid-19, that made him an unpopular president whose contract was not renewed. Less assured is his capacity to recognize the link between his conduct and this outcome.
In fact, since entering politics, Mr. Trump has often delighted in cutting down opponents who sounded too practiced or restrained.
“Just words,” he said of Mr. Biden as the Democrat accepted his party’s nomination last summer.
“It’s just words, folks,” Mr. Trump said of Hillary Clinton at an October 2016 debate days after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, at once deflecting any denunciation of his own remarks and calling Mrs. Clinton’s empty. “It’s just words.”
As president, Mr. Trump benefited daily from an army of defenders, in Congress and across the conservative media, who dedicated themselves to interpreting his often-inexplicable words as charitably as possible.
And since his time as a private citizen, Mr. Trump has generally been insulated from the fallout from his words because associates have been left to navigate it instead.
“He said stupid things, and we did damage control, and that was it,” said Barbara A. Res, a former executive vice president of the Trump Organization. “He never gave it a thought.”
Experts in the Trump canon have struggled to summon an analogy for his present conditions, when his words or deeds had caused things he cared about to be taken from him.
“Ivana during that first divorce kind of got back at him a bit,” Ms. Blair recalled of the amply chronicled dissolution of his first marriage, before reconsidering. “In fact, he loved that whole thing because it got him more ink.”
Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote “Trump: The Art of the Deal” and has in recent years become a ferocious critic, said Mr. Trump’s relative evasion of consequences until now “has progressively increased his conviction that he can and should get away with anything he does.”
It is no surprise, then, that since last week, as in much of his White House tenure, Mr. Trump has proved himself capable of only temporary modulation, defaulting to defiance but snapping to attention when advisers impressed upon him that he could face legal exposure for his incitements.
In a video on Wednesday, he condemned “violence and vandalism” and held up his “true” supporters as champions of law enforcement — a message aimed, perhaps, at unnerved Senate Republicans ahead of his impeachment trial.
Yet for all the things Mr. Trump did not say — that he lost the election, that Mr. Biden would be inaugurated, that he assumed any responsibility for the state of affairs — and all the things he has said before, it was impossible to believe the president’s heart was in it, implausible to assume the words were meant to last, to hang rather than explode in the White House air.
“All of us can choose by our actions to rise above the rancor …” he said dutifully this time.
“ … to overcome the passions of the moment …”
“ … to move forward united …”
Anyone listening knew that these were just words.
Matt Flegenheimer is a reporter covering national politics. He started at The Times in 2011 on the Metro desk covering transit, City Hall and campaigns. More about Matt Flegenheimer
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman
Our Coverage of the Capitol Riot and its Fallout
The Events on Jan. 6
Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump raided the U.S. Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.
A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a New York Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.
Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.
Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, Jan. 6 wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.
The Federal Case Against Trump
The Indictment: Trump was indicted on Aug. 1 after a sprawling federal investigation into his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. Here is how the indictment was structured.
Trump’s Immunity Claim: The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. The justices scheduled arguments for the week of April 22.
The Trial: In February, the federal judge in the case decided to delay the trial, which was set to start on March 4. In doing so, she acknowledged that time had run out to get the proceeding going, mostly because of the wrangling over Trump’s immunity claim.
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