Former President Donald Trump was audible, if not visible, all day long on Monday — and the effect is to keep him front and center in the Republican Party conversation.
His unwillingness, or inability, to lay low is exactly what many Trump observers expected, but a stark departure from the behavior of other ex-presidents.
“The code of the presidents club is to get out of the way and let the new commander in chief have a year or two,” CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.
But Trump is so narcissistic that “he cannot accept to be out of the spotlight for a day,” Brinkley concluded.
Lately Trump has been doing what comes naturally to him — dictating tweet-like statements, calling into conservative talk shows, and generally stirring up trouble. “I like this better than Twitter,” he claimed on Newsmax. “Actually they did us a favor. This is better.”
Trump has shown no courtesy to President Joe Biden since leaving the White House. To the contrary, he has repeatedly jabbed the Biden administration in the eye.
On the phone with one of his biggest sycophants, Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, on Monday evening, Kelly speculated about Biden’s mental faculties, prompting Trump to say “there’s something” going on with Biden. Trump then questioned “whether or not he understands what he’s signing” when bills cross his desk.
Trump is the first US president to lose re-election in nearly thirty years. The last president who failed to win a second term, George H.W. Bush, “made clear that he expected to retire from public life,” according to historian Tim Naftali’s biography of Bush.
Naftali said Bush told his successor, Bill Clinton, in November 1992 that “when I leave here, you’re going to have no trouble from me.”
The outgoing president added, “I will do nothing to complicate your work and I just want you to know that.”
Since then, he has gradually increased his visibility, with emails to members of the media from “45 Office” so far in March, twice as many as in February. His “Save America PAC” has also become quite active in recent weeks, with numerous endorsements, critiques of “RINOs,” and media bashing statements.
Trump seemed self-aware about his media approach during a podcast taping with Lisa Boothe, which was released on…
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