The Once, Still, and Future President

Shortly before the tweet below, NBC News noted

Foreign leaders have lined up to speak with him. He has rattled Mexico and Canada with threats of steep tariffs and warned there would be “hell to pay” for militants in Gaza unless they release the hostages by the time he’s sworn in.

That won't happen for another 45 days, but Donald Trump, the president-in-waiting, isn't shying away from acting like the president-in-reality.

Trump can't sign a bill or issue an executive order yet, but he is crowding out Joe Biden as the sitting president winds down his term and steadily recedes from public view. In two foreign trips since the election, Biden has answered all of two questions from reporters.

He has been left to kibitz about Trump’s pronouncements — “I hope he rethinks it,” he said of Trump’s plan to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico — rather than drive an agenda of his own.

Why TF is Donald Trump in France for the reopening of Notre Dame and meeting with President Macron?

What a total disgrace. pic.twitter.com/2PbOe0POfC

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) December 7, 2024

Throughout the campaign this summer and fall, Republicans routinely referred to their candidate as "President Trump" or "the President."  Many broadcast "journalists" did so also and only on rare occassions would the news host \offer the correction of "ex-President" or "former President."

If there was one essential prenuse if Trump's candidacy, it was that he has been "President Trump" all along. AP reported in March

Republican Donald Trump has launched his general election campaign not merely rewriting the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, but positioning the violent siege and its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.

At a weekend rally in Ohio, his first as the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee, Trump stood onstage, his hand raised in salute to the brim of his red MAGA hat, as a recorded chorus of prisoners in jail for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack sang the national anthem.

An announcer asked the crowd to please rise “for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” And people did, and sang along.

“They were unbelievable patriots,” Trump said as the recording ended.

Having previously vowed to pardon the rioters, he promised to help them “the first day we get into office.”

In September, Trump admitted that he had lost the 2020 election "by a whisker." That was six months after falsely claiming "eighty-two percent of the country understands that it was a rigged election" and three months after whining that Biden "only attained the position of president by lies, fake news, and not leaving his basement."

It's who he is- or rather, whom he pretends he is. He always has to be the Big Man on Campus and wants to portray himself as having always been President. He's still the guy who brushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro at a NATO summit in Brussels in May, 2017. He always has to be the Big Man on Campus, who became the President, was cheated out of a second term, and will be President indefinitely.

        

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