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Donald Trump likes to pretend he is still president — but his act caught up with him at Arlington

13 69
28.08.2024

Over the weekend Donald Trump whined that the Harris campaign was treating him like the incumbent and it's totally not fair:

The fact is that they are framing some of the campaign as a referendum on Trump. And why wouldn't they? The former president is running on the lies about the alleged halcyon days when America was great (2017 -2019) and the vice president is running on "a new way forward" and "we're not going back." If he doesn't want to be seen as the incumbent maybe he should stop pretending he is one.

If he didn't want people to think of him as the incumbent maybe he shouldn't have acted like he was for the past four years.

From the moment Trump glumly flew off to Mar-a-Lago on January 20, 2021, he's been acting like a president in exile. He flies around on a plane he calls "Trump Force One" and uses an ersatz presidential seal at any podium he stands behind. He insists on being called "Mr. President" (never "former") and everyone around him treats him as if he still is. He's been running a shadow government, with GOP officials rushing to get his permission before they take any action and everyone clamoring for his dispensation in their campaigns. One of the most obvious examples of his power over the GOP was his thumbs down on the painfully negotiated bipartisan border bill. He didn't even pretend that it had anything to do with the policy, he just didn't want Biden to be able to run on it as one of his accomplishments. He essentially vetoed the bill from his Gilded White House in Florida.

And he routinely meets........

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