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Donald Trump on election night was like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won,’ ” according to one close adviser, who spoke to The Washington Post for a remarkable recap of the 20 days since the election.
More than 30 senior administration officials, members of his legal team, campaign aides and advisers told the paper of his increasingly unhinged attempts to overturn the election result, and how those left within the White House humoured him.
Those around the president after 3 November were “happy to scratch his itch,” the close adviser said.
“If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh, we won’t tell him.'”
Of the ensuing legal strategy, a senior administration told the paper that the theory was: “Just roll everybody up who is willing to do it into a clown car, and when it’s time for a press conference, roll them out.”
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The paper confirmed that, on the night of the election, Mr Trump was enraged by Fox News being the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden – a call which ultimately proved correct – and that he ordered his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to ring Rupert Murdoch and demand a retraction.
In the days that followed Mr Trump surrounded himself by people who told him what he wanted to hear, the paper reported, such as campaign pollster John McLaughlin, who told the president of a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Mr Trump with a positive approval rating and a majority in the country who thought the media had been “unfair and biased against him”.
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