New York Post, Sunday, November 15, 2020nypost.comMichael Goodwin
I
T will take a miracle now, actu-
ally several of them, but Presi-
dent Trump is not ready to
throw in the towel. Publicly at
least, he’s still full of fight.
“This election was stolen,” he
says. “It was a rigged election, 100
percent, and everyone knows it.”
“It’s going to be that I got about
74 million votes, and I lost?” he
adds. “It’s not possible.”
It was nearly 6 p.m. Friday and I
had reached the president after
his late-afternoon update on Op-
eration Warp Speed, the success-
ful race to produce a coronavirus
vaccine. The Rose Garden presen-
tation had been smooth and effec-
tive, yet he seemed resigned to
never getting credit for pushing
government and industry to rap-
idly finish a process that usually
takes years.
“Six months to produce a vac-
cine,” he said. “Joe Biden couldn’t
have done that but you get no
credit.”
Except for his silent Veterans
Day appearance at Arlington Na-
tional Cemetery, the vaccine up-
date was his first time on camera
since the election, an absence that
seemed like a lifetime given his
omnipresence for four years. He
took no questions and had not
given any interviews.
Earlier Friday, he spoke to Ger-
aldo Rivera of Fox News, a long-
time friend, with Rivera saying on
Twitter that the president admit-
ted that winning was a “long shot”
and that he would ultimately do
“the right thing.”
I got a similar sense of the presi-
dent’s mood, even as he resisted
saying anything definitive. In our
10-minute phone interview, he
spoke evenly, displaying no anger
or even agitation. There was a
matter-of-fact tone that suggested
an understanding of the inevi -
table.
In different ways, I asked if he
would accept the results if his
court challenges fail.
“We’ll see how it turns out,” he
said at one point.
When I asked if he could come
to terms with defeat, he re-
sponded only that “it’s hard to
come to terms when they won’t let
your poll watchers in to observe”
the counting.
A third time, he said, “Again, I
can’t tell you what’s going to hap-
pen.”He seems genuinely convinced
that victory was stolen and
pointed repeatedly to Dominion
Voting Systems, a technology used
by most states, including Michi-
gan and Georgia.
“It was turned down by the state
of Texas because it is insecure,”
Trump said. He also repeated
claims that some of the private
company’s owners and investors
have ties to Democrats, and it is
true the firm made a contribution
and worked with the Clinton Fam-
ily Foundation during the Obama-
Biden administration.
The Associated Press confirms
that a former top aide to House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is one of the
company’s lobbyists. The AP said
the firm also employs a lobbyist
who worked for Republicans Dick
Cheney and John Boehner.
Those bipartisan connections
are not positives in Trump World.
Instead, they paint Dominion as a
creature of the swamp that Trump
came to Washington to drain.
Although Biden holds a decisive
lead in the Electoral College and
gained a history-making 78 mil-
lion popular votes, Trump cannot
reconcile his standing with the
campaign and the successful per-
formance of the GOP as a whole.
He cited the massive, enthusias-
tic crowds at his rallies as evi-
dence. “A small rally was 25,
people and Biden had tiny crowds,
nobody came,” he said. “I wasn’t
losing those states.”
He also noted that the GOP ap-
parently held the Senate, depend-
ing on the two Georgia runoffs,
and is picking up perhaps 12 seats
in the House and flipping state
legislative chambers.
“We’re doing great,” he said.
My hunch is that, when there
are no avenues of appeal left, the
president will acknowledge defeat
while holding to his claims of
fraud. Whether he will do that in a
speech or a statement or just a
tweet is part of the drama he
excels at creating.
Soon, however, custom requires
that he invite Biden to the White
House for a photo op and order
his team to cooperate with the in-
coming administration. Barack
Obama bit his lip and did it with
Trump in 2016, and Trump should
graciously pass the baton to
Biden.
It won’t be pleasant, but thepresident would be doing no
favors to himself, his supporters
and his future if he lets resentment
rule his final actions as president.
An election is supposed to give the
country a needed respite from the
hostilities of the campaign.
Of course, when Trump was
elected, that respite was shorter
than the blink of an eye. His many
grievances against Democrats, BigMedia and Big Tech are valid and
a fair history must reflect that his
enormous policy successes came
despite unfair and un-American
assaults on his legitimacy.
In that regard, he sees the elec-
tion results as just the concluding
act of a confederacy against him
that began with the Obama-Biden
administration’s corrupting of the
FBI and CIA to spy on him in 2016The larger fight endures
‘We’re doing great!’ In an interview with The Post’s Michael
Goodwin, President Trump heralded the Republican Party’s good show-
ing at the polls — including his own vote total of more than 73 million.Getty Imagesand tip the election to Hillary
Clinton. That effort gave birth to
the Russia, Russia, Russia narra-
tive that wasn’t fully revealed as
false until the probe of Special
Counsel Robert Mueller finally
concluded in 2019.
“It’s amazing but nothing hap-
pened to [Jim] Comey and [An-
drew] McCabe, even though they
were caught cold,” he said of the
disgraced former FBI leaders.
“Then this, the greatest theft in
the history of America. And
everybody knows it.”
He complained about polls that
had him losing battleground states
by big margins, calling them “sup-
pression polls” because they dis-
couraged donors as well as voters.
“These weren’t accidents or bad
pollsters,” Trump said. “These are
corrupt institutions,” and he singled
out ABC and The Washington Post.
He didn’t even mention the par-
tisan impeachment, making him
just the third president to face
such infamy. At the time it seemed
the most outrageous act of all, but
in the end it was just part of a rep-
rehensible pattern of dirty tricks.
Almost as an afterthought,
Trump brought up the way most
of the media ignored The Post’s
exclusive reporting on the bomb-
shell e-mails on Hunter Biden’s
laptop that implicate Joe Biden in
his son’s business schemes.
“They didn’t even report all the
crimes of the Biden family,” Trump
said. “If I did any of that.. .”
Assessing the full impact of his
presidency will be the work of fu-
ture historians, but there is no
doubt that Trump, warts and all,
was a smashing success in fulfill-
ing the fundamental purpose of
his election.
He brought a much-needed
course correction to Washington
and remade the Republican Party.
His economic populism is turning
the GOP into a multiracial, multi-
ethnic party of working-class
strivers and America Firsters
while forcing Dems to choose be-
tween the radical far left and the
remnants of traditional liberals.
Whatever the president decides
about his personal future, Trump-
ism lives. That alone is conclusive
proof that Donald Trump was a
hugely consequential president
whose policies made life better
for millions and millions of
Americans.