Trump, even as late as this weekend, repeated the lie on his blog that the election was stolen from him by non-existent voter fraud.  He bragged that 80% of Republicans believed that lie as he desperately tries to keep his iron grip on the party that he wants destroyed.  Trump is nothing, if not obsesively vindictive.  What’s telling, though, have been his actions.  How do we know?  Trump tried to wreck as much of the US government as he could on the way out the door.  I don’t think he would have done that had he truly believed he won.

On November 9th, John McEtee, aide to Trump, told Douglas Macgregor, new acting defense secretary Chris Miller’s senior advisor, that Trump wanted full military withdrawal, by Inauguration Day,  from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, all of Africa, and…wait for it…Germany.  Recall that Miller had just taken on the defense job after Trump fired Mark Esper by tweet just a few days earlier.  This, as you would imagine, was an impossible task, and worse, it was from out in left field.  A written order followed two days later that commanded the Pentagon to withdraw troops  from Somalia by December 15th, and Afghanistan bay January 15th.  It was personally signed by Trump in his idiotic scribble.  The order sent shockwaves through the Pentagon as leaders realized that this was an “off the books” operation with none of the usual planning, table top simulations, or alternatives.  This was just Trump being Trump, and luckily the Pentagon held the line, slow walking the order to run out the clock.

At the same time, Trump tried to wreck the CIA and dig dirt on his enemies by installing loyalists at the top of the agency trying to get the director, Gina Haspel, to resign.  Mercifully, that effort also failed as Pence and WH counsel Pat Cipollone came to Haspel’s defense.  Switching tactics, Trump then installed a Nunes staffer and Trump loyalist, Michael Ellis, to the general counsel position at the NSA, a position difficult to terminate by the new administration.  In an appropriate end to his short career, Ellis resigned in April after he had been sidelined by an IG investigation into his role in the handling of classified information and placed on indefinite leave.

It’s now just coming out that Trump’s DOJ tried to get the courts to unmask a Twitter user who had gotten under Devin Nunes skin with a parody account @NunesAlt.  Barr’s attorneys sought a grand jury subpoena of Twitter to reveal the user’s actual name, and Twitter had fought the subpoena until the demand was dropped after Biden took office.

These are just a few examples of the lengths to which Trump went in the waning days of his infestation to wreck as much of the government that he could, install loyalists as his spies, and punish his supporters’ enemies.  Luckily the actual public servants in these agencies kept their oaths to the Constitution, and repelled Trump’s attacks.  Next time (if there is a next time) we might not be so lucky.