Fantasy's End

The late, great sportswriter Pete Axthelm famously said, “The goddess of wagering saves her wrath, for those who count their money at the half.”  The half in this case was before 10 p.m. eastern time on election night. In his book “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House,” Michael Wolff writes of the moment, “the president formed the absolute conviction--that is, confirmed the conviction he had already formed--that he had again, overcoming all odds, won the presidency. He was in a relaxed, easy, I-told-you-so mood and, with his outside callers, basking in his victory.”

Then, Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden.  Numbers man Matt Oczkowski’s model couldn’t be wrong. Rupert Murdoch was screwing him. Then Trump’s lead evaporated in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. As Wolff explains, “Donald Trump saw an election emotionally rather than quantitatively.” 

Although famous for his business acumen, for Trump, numbers were not a fixed thing, “for him they were surprisingly, even magically elastic.” Elections, like bets, lie in the fickle hands of the Goddess of Wagering and as the aforementioned Axthelm wrote: "The Goddess must be appeased, soothed, tithed. She must never be affronted by statements hinting that a gambler has taken fate into his own firm grip."

Surrounded by yes men, Trump believed what they told him. “They gave him ecstatic news.” To this day, he may still believe them, and thus, the stolen election fable was regenerated and endlessly repeated. The “Big Lie,” first began with Obama’s 2008 victory. Trump’s birtherism worked to “undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites,” writes Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, “was a progenitor of the Big Lie.”    

Wolff’s fly-on-the-wall account provides stunning details of a deranged madman ranting to anyone who would listen about how he’d been done wrong, while the federal government ran rudderless. 

COVID provided state legislatures the opportunity to ramp-up mail-in voting on a massive scale. Trump’s denigration of the practice, while Democrats embraced it impacted his results and he was left crying foul.  

Rudy Giullani has a starring role in “Landslide.” Constantly inebriated with his girth approaching 300 pounds, Giullani pushed his way to the front of the Stop the Steal charade. Wolff quotes the late Fox News founder Roger Ailes, who had said with a laugh, “Rudy is Rudy, and Donald is Donald, and together that’s an equation which adds up to a loss of contact with most other rational people, if not reality itself.”   

Wolff calls the hiring of attorney Sidney Powell, “the tipping point into utter flapdoodleness.” She told tales of voting systems created by Hugo Chavez with Communist money from Venezuela, Cuba, and China. 

The president’s fantasy of overturning the election was fueled by John Eastman’s theories. The constitutional scholar floated the idea with Trump that VP Mike Pence could object to the counting of the electoral ballots. 

“All up to his discretion,” Eastman told the president.

“Totally up to him to send these votes back?”

“Totally.” 

But, when White House lawyer Pat Cipollone asked Eastman if this was really possible, Eastman said, “Theoretically, maybe, but not likely.” 

Cipollone reminded Eastman that he had just told the president it was doable. 

“Well, worth a shot,” he said with a dismissive shrug. 

Wolff mentions the December 12th warm-up rally we don’t hear much about, despite four people being stabbed and 33 arrested. Trump compared the participants, his fans, to the costumed contestants on Let’s Make a Deal. 

“Seems like quite a few crazies,” Trump said, bringing to mind a comment H.L. Mencken said to Charles Angoff: “There’s no grander show on earth than American democracy,” he said. “How can any one keep from laughing when one contemplates what takes place here every four years on the national scale and every two years or three years on the local level? The poor boobs are heated up...and this or that rogue is elected and milks the very boobs who got him the job.” 

The real heat came on January 6th, with Trump supporters storming the Capitol, while their leader who had egged them on watched on TV. 

Wolff's book concludes with an interview with the ex-president at Mar-a-lago.  Trump told the author of the great life he’d given up to be president.”But I’ve also done a thousand things that nobody has done. Nobody has done what I’ve done.” 

In the first half of 2021, the rogue milked his boobs for an astonishing $100 million.  Meanwhile, over 535 defendants have been arrested in nearly all 50 states (this includes those charged in both District and Superior Court) for their part in the January 6th riot.

Nobody, indeed.