Just five days after Donald J. Trump left office, one of his aides emailed a lawyer to request approval of an official seal for use on statements from the 45th president’s office.
Margo Martin, one of his closest personal aides, told lawyer Scott Gast that advisers had designed a subtly altered seal for Mr Trump. “They said they changed a few things to avoid trademark issues,” he wrote, asking Mr. Gast if the design was acceptable.
The final image used by Mr Trump’s team – a recognizable eagle from the Great Seal of the United States, placed in a circle – was suggestive of the presidential seal that identified Mr Trump with the job he had just left. And while he is hardly the first former occupant of the White House to place an eagle on his website, early discussions of presidential imagery revealed what turned out to be a major obsession of Mr. Trump’s: to be seen as both a future president and former.
Mr. Trump vacated the White House before noon on January 20, 2021, as required by the Constitution. But since arriving at his Mar-a-Lago home, his members-only club in Florida, he has seized every opportunity to play the part of a sitting president, including using the typical post-presidential trappings. in trying to regain office.
At the very least, that approach may have helped soothe Mr. Trump’s bruised ego. But he has arguably become a crucial factor in his bid to return to power.
A majority of Republican voters, according to polls, see Mr. Trump not as a “loser ex-president,” as President Biden often calls him, but as a wrongfully ousted president whose re-election would right a grave injustice. Elected Republicans who once privately scoffed at conspiracy theories about a stolen election now publicly insist that Mr. Trump was the real winner, for fear of antagonizing their voters or him.
This widespread adherence to Mr. Trump’s denial of reality has reaped enormous political benefits. His stance as president-in-exile robbed his opponents in the Republican primary of one of the most powerful arguments available against him. While his presidency was a net asset for him in the short-term GOP primary, it will be used against him — especially on abortion policy — by Democrats and the Biden campaign if he becomes the Republican nominee in the general election.
From the moment he began his post-presidential life, Mr. Trump refused to act like someone whose days as president were over.
He shut down any talks about building a Trump presidential library. He clung to classified government documents, reveling in his knowledge of the government’s innermost secrets and showing them to visitors and aides—an act that resulted in one of his four indictments. “I’ll keep my title for life,” he told a member of the House in 2017 about the power of being president.
On January 25, 2021, Mr. Trump’s office emailed a press release, marking the official launch of his post-presidential tenure, titled: “Statement from the Office of the Former President.”
The word “former” was never used again. Subsequent statements were sent by “45th President Donald J. Trump”.
As he rolls toward the Republican nomination — which would make him the first former president to win his party’s nomination since Grover Cleveland in 1892 — Mr. Trump is taking advantage of his unusual position to turn the tide in big ways. and small ones.
He has branded himself as both the rightful president and the inevitable future president. He used the privileges, majesty and powers that come with the presidency to make his opponents look insignificant. And he has imbued his campaign with presidential imagery, traveling on a plane his aides call “Trump Force One” and using his Secret Service motorcade and security detail as a muscular expression of the pseudo-regime. Uniquely, his only remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, was appointed UN ambassador by him and served under him, making her foreign policy achievements also his.
He has also used his post-presidency as a shield – both in and out of the courtroom. He claimed presidential immunity from charges of conspiring to sway the 2020 election. And his team responded to requests from news networks to put dash cameras on Mr. Trump’s motorcade to court visits, turning his criminal charges — they were four in 2023 – in thrilling live TV spectacles.
Asked about Mr. Trump’s use of presidential imagery in the Republican nomination contest, Mr. Trump’s communications director, Steven Chung, said in a statement: “President Trump is the most famous person in the world, and he’s running for president. White House. The media needs him and his campaign because their entire existence revolves around what he’s doing.”
Mr. Trump has used his power as party leader to corner Republicans in Congress, meddling in House speaker races and the current battle over border security and Ukraine funding. He has used the power of his support to aggressively exercise and maintain control of the party.
Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author of the presidency, said Mr. Trump was “using the presidency as a stepping stone to get re-elected, but when you refuse the election, you’re basically saying to the country, ‘I’m actually a shadow. government.'”
“So that’s where the waters are muddied,” he added.
In this campaign like no other in American history, Mr. Trump has tried to act more like a sitting president than a typical candidate. He has received many of the perks of being in office—the grandeur of office, the devaluation of opponents and voters—but, so far, none of the political ramifications of actually occupying the White House, such as being held responsible for foreign wars or inflation.
Pressing Control
In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, some of Mr. Trump’s aides and confidantes encouraged him to graciously concede his loss. They argued that if he took credit for Republican victories in the House and Senate races and acknowledged Mr. Biden’s narrow victory, he would preserve a future for himself in American politics.
That future, they believed, was permanently marred by his election lies and the attack on Capitol Hill by a pro-Trump mob on January 6, 2021.
These aides and confidants were wrong. Far from destroying him, Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat — a months-long outburst of rage that culminated in a deadly attack on Capitol Hill — almost certainly helped secure his political future: It kept control of the Republican Party and allowed him to is running His 2024 campaign as if he were the rightful occupant of the Oval Office seeking nothing but his restoration to power.
Mr Trump – who has inhaled media attention like oxygen for decades – had no interest in the quieter, less visible lives of other past presidents. George W. Bush dabbled in painting and paid speeches. Barack Obama gave speeches, played golf, traveled with rich friends on superyachts and raised money for various causes, including a presidential library in Chicago.
Mr. Trump played a lot of golf, but the similarities end there.
Cut off from social media after being banned from Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump has created his own pipelines for voters. He created his own social networking site, Truth Social. they interviewed right-wing influencers with their own platforms. and contacted supporters via fundraising emails.
Mr Trump has clung to the trappings of the presidency – as instruments of power, leverage and, some have suggested, psychological comforters. Many Republicans have welcomed him for acting like an establishment figure. One of his most covered early stops as a candidate last year was in East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a train derailment that President Biden had yet to visit. There, he met with local officials and urged action to help residents. Mr. Trump’s arrival at a nearby airport and his descent from his plane from the aircraft’s tall stairs were suggestive of the arrival of Air Force One.
Mr. Trump also never stopped acting like a party leader, holding rallies, meddling in Republican primary races and working to end the careers of congressional Republicans who had opposed him. Candidates traveled to Mar-a-Lago to solicit his endorsement. And Mr. Trump made them work for it. He treated their support for his false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 as a litmus test.
In time, he would expect those Republicans to return the favor and support him. They did not disappoint.
A president in the courtroom
Perhaps most notably, Mr. Trump has sought to use the powers of his former position as a defensive measure in his criminal and civil litigation.
He has asserted ex officio immunity as a defense for his conduct in the months leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack in both criminal and civil suits. This immunity claim is under litigation and is expected to be ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court.
At the libel trial against him in Manhattan, Mr. Trump spoke to the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, without suffering the criminal consequences that an ordinary defendant might face. And while Judge Kaplan called him “Mr. Trump” throughout the trial, when Mr Trump’s lawyer Alina Haba announced her client as the final witness, she said: “The defense is calling President Donald Trump.”
Similarly, in a separate civil case in Manhattan, in which Mr. Trump and his company were found to have engaged in widespread financial fraud, he faced no consequences for sharply and vocally criticizing the presiding judge, Justice Arthur Engoron of the U.S. Supreme Court. State. from the witness stand.
And when opposing lawyers protested Mr. Trump’s conviction, his lawyer, Chris M. Keys, suggested that Judge Engoron “grant the former president of the United States” — who, he quickly added, “may soon be the next president of the United States. State — little room to explain.’
