Trump shifts between combativeness and grievance

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President Donald Trump arrives at election day on Tuesday toggling between confidence and exasperation, bravado and grievance, and marinating in frustration that he is trailing Joe Biden, whom he considers an unworthy opponent.

“Man, it’s going to be embarrassing if I lose to this guy,” Trump has told advisers, a lament he has aired publicly as well. But in the off-camera version, Trump frequently exclaims, “This guy!” in reference to Biden, with a salty adjective separating the words, reports Reuters.

Trailing in most polls, Trump has careened through a marathon series of rallies in the past week, trying to tear down Biden and energise his supporters, but also fixated on crowd size and targeting perceived enemies like the news media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s infectious disease expert whom he suggested on Sunday he might try to dismiss after the election.

At every turn, the president has railed that the voting system is rigged against him and has threatened to sue when the election is over, in an obvious bid to undermine an electoral process strained by the coronavirus pandemic. It is not clear, however, precisely what legal instruments Trump believes he has at his disposal.

The president, his associates say, has drawn encouragement from his larger audiences and from a stream of relatively upbeat polling information that advisers have curated for him, typically filtering out the bleakest numbers.

On a trip to Florida last week, several aides told the president that winning the Electoral College was a certainty, a prognosis not supported by Republican or Democratic polling, according to people familiar with the conversation. And Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, has responded with chipper enthusiasm when Trump has raised the idea of making a late bid for solidly Democratic states like New Mexico, an option other aides have told the president is unrealistic.

His mad dash to the finish is a distillation of his four tumultuous years in office, a mix of resentment, combativeness and a penchant for viewing events through a prism all his own — and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.