Donald Trump is a retired president who refuses to behave like a retired president. Those who follow him closely affirm that it is his way of maintaining the illusion that he continues to command the United States, only that Joe Biden and electoral fraud orchestrated by Democrats and progressives moved him from the Oval Office chair. Others think that it is the formula to keep his supporters excited and the box office open to donations. In one way or another, behaving as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama have done after leaving the White House would be synonymous with acknowledging his electoral defeat in 2020. And that is not going through his head.
In this fantasy, the tycoon has transformed the ballroom of his private club in Mar-a-Lago into a kind 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 capable of providing shade, is flanked by national flags and exercises authority enough to yell at the staff and get them to remain faithful to him. He only lacks the button with which he ordered cokes in the White House, but here he does it loudly. After all, this is his house. Trump House.
They say that many of his office hours consist of permanent anger. Perhaps he suffers from a metabolic process that translates into bad gestures the news that assails him every morning from the front pages of the newspapers and television channels, which he carefully reviews before leaving home. The latest accusations by the congressional committee, which implicated him in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, although not physically, but morally, the recommendation to disqualify him for future public office or the crimes of fraud that fall on the Trump Organization, his financial empire, are probably behind the perpetual storm of Mar-a-Lago.
Unlike his predecessors, Trump does not write books or offer lectures paid for at the price of Galician barnacles around the world. He is also not dedicated to building a presidential library with which to increase the archives of the national funds. He has not even donated many of the official gifts received during his legislature, as is customary since they automatically become articles of political worship. He is told that he was able to take up to a hundred gift boxes with him when he left Washington. And another bunch of ‘top secret’ documents, for which he is being investigated. In this regard, the hypothesis grows that he did not do it for spurious reasons. Simply, continuing to keep state secrets in his desk drawers made him feel more of a president.
Instead, he has set up his own foundation, American First, although his vocation has nothing to do with the center for peace that Jimmy Carter created in his day or the Obama Foundation, which the first black president of the United States set up in Washington after leaving the White House. He and Michelle put their experience and their names at the service of this group of discussion and training of talents that has trained more than 700 leaders from Europe, Africa and Asia. American First is something else. It is an organization that is nourished by private financing and whose purpose is essentially to perpetuate Trumpism. Even while her guru sleeps on one coast, hundreds of volunteers continue to proselytize on the other, a fearsome exercise because of how it fuels extremism, according to its detractors.
The tycoon and Kanye West pose in 2016 at Trump Tower in New York /
It is in this context that Trump is unchained. The Republican Party still hasn’t figured out how to resolve the halo 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 scolded the artist now known as Ye, banned from the networks and dispossessed of commercial contracts due to his anti-Semitic manifestations, for having brought to his home a reference from the extreme right who advocates a governed United States exclusively by non-Jewish and non-Muslim whites. “Kanye West really wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner gathering was meant to be just me and Kanye, but he came with a guest he had never met and knew nothing about,” Trump later said.
The problem is that the damage was done. Fuentes is a toxic figure to associate with a political candidate. He was on the fateful January 6 at the Capitol where he called to “recover this country even by force”, a well-known agitator on social networks, he considers himself a paleoconservative and an ‘incel’, a voluntary celibate, a name that groups lovers of conspiracies, frustrated men and deep misogynists. His anti-Semitic views have earned him the label of a neo-Nazi, he rejects immigration, condemns abortion and maintains that women and members of the LGTBI community should be disenfranchised. The ideal type of individual to scare away from Christmas dinner.
Lack of filters
Trump’s slippage is explained by some of his former acquaintances by the current lack of filters that, in the past, in the White House, protected him and acted as a shield against certain excesses. In his Florida office, the staff is completely submissive and lacks institutional positions that give them any authority before the boss. During his tenure, cabinet members such as Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA, James Mattis, defense secretary who resigned almost two years later due to the president’s radical drift, or Mike Pence, the vice president who refused to go all the way in the attempt to boycott the 2020 elections, had the track record and weight to stand up to him. Now, the only ones who seem to pay attention are his lawyers.
The perfect example of submission may be the day that Trump wanted to make a public statement in his particular Oval Office. In the White House there is usually a guard team of expert journalists in the Administration in case the Government or the president decide to make an unexpected announcement. But the advisers did not want to face the tycoon to make him see that in Mar-a-Lago nobody waits at the door, that his interest in information is no longer the same once he is stripped of his institutional position, and they dedicated themselves to calling editors from all over the world. the State to try to compose an acceptable group to attend his appearance. It doesn’t help that Trump is going it alone either. On Truth Social, his own social network, he shoots 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 have reproached him for the inopportuneness of him and his companies, lamented the image of fanaticism that he conveys and have even asked him to “throw West and Fuentes from his side” because “they are not the best companions.” Even so, the polls do not strike him down either. 17% of Americans believe that their dinner with the supremacist streamer was a mistake, but 47% are neither for nor against. 40% of those of legal age, especially Republicans, but also some Democrats, continue to hold a good opinion of him.
The rejection, evidently, is concentrated by progressive Americans, who see white supremacism as one of the great current threats to the United States. So does the FBI. It is the same Democratic sector that finds incomprehensible Trump’s symbolic concessions to QAnon, the conspiracy macro-organization that considers the Democrats cannibalistic pedophiles and waits for the former president to retake the White House while Joe Biden and the leaders of the center and left of the United States are put on trial. and executed.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with their partners, at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in 2017 /
Outside of controversial dinners, what else is going on at the Trump House? According to the American media, the former president plays golf every day at his club before going to the Oval Office bis. He usually sits down to work after lunch. At night he appears in the halls where his guests pay to dine and greet him. When he retires to his private quarters, they applaud him. Weddings and other events are also held at Mar-a-Lago. Everything is good for finances.
Up to date with the political pulse
Another part of his agenda is occupied by the meetings he convenes with dignitaries or foreign officials (already in his time as head of government he invited his counterparts there, such as the Chinese Xi Jinping), businessmen, analysts, famous commentators and different 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 with the political, economic and international pulse, and soak up arguments for the electoral strategy.
Those who are not seen around the mansion are a good number of his former collaborators in the White House or those he recruited in his later stage, when he convinced many to continue by his side thinking that his thesis on electoral fraud would expire. and he would revalidate himself as president. During the transition of power there was a kind of fiction in that sense. Until January 5, 2021, after all the frustrated attempts to prove fraud and in the run-up to Biden being confirmed as head of government and the assault on the Capitol taking place, the fantasy endured. Such was the faith that the The White House Republican team did not even bother to organize the move beforehand or manage government grants for outgoing presidents to set up their civilian office and pay their new employees. The procedures were done at the last minute. Apparently, Trump aides wanted to charge the particular Mar-a-Lago Oval Office to those funds. But it didn’t slip.
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