Daniel DePetris

The fallout from last week’s storming of Congress by a pro-Trump mob of misfits and criminals has made the controversy over the infamous 2016 Access Hollywood tape look like a cakewalk. In the week since the worst political violence in Washington, D.C. since the British burned the White House and the Capitol Building in 1814, three cabinet secretaries have resigned in disgust over Donald Trump’s response to the melee. The White House is now stocked with dead-enders and hangers-on. Some of Trump’s most loyal allies, including former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, senator Lindsey Graham and former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, have either denounced the president or turned their backs on him.

Watching television news, captivated by the images of pro-Trump rioters, looters, and frankly losers storm the Capitol building in service of a lost cause, I could not but help think about the old analogy that best summarises the Donald Trump era: it's like a train-wreck; it’s hard to watch, but you can’t look away. Unfortunately, the train-wreck we are talking about today is the American Republic, which was thrown into complete and utter disarray when thousands of disgruntled, angry, maskless Trump devotees broke the barriers outside the Capitol Building, breached the doors, chased police officers up the marble staircases, and made the House and Senate chambers their own personal lounging areas.

When U.S. presidents leave office they usually take a step back to work on pet projects or write their memoirs. Jimmy Carter, one of the most active former presidents in U.S. history, began the widely-acclaimed Carter Center to monitor elections around the world. He also continued to serve as an unofficial U.S. government representative. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama began foundations of their own, with both remaining involved in hot-button political topics. George W. Bush decided to go back to his ranch in Texas and take up painting. But Donald Trump may be spending his first few months in retirement fending off criminal investigations against his business. And therein lies the obvious question: is it possible that Trump could be charged with a crime?

Donald Trump is out of the White House in less than two months. But he has scores to settle before he vacates his chair to Joe Biden, the man who defeated him at the ballot box earlier this month. First, it was the firing of multiple officials at the Pentagon who were deemed by Trump to be insufficiently loyal to his agenda. Next came the replacement of those officials with ultra-loyalists who would implement his orders without question or reservation. And now, Trump is levying his exclusive right to pardon people of federal crimes – a power unique to the presidency.

As Donald Trump continues to insist that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, speculation has grown about how the president will spend the next four years. Trump's political future isn’t over, even if he did become the first president to lose re-election since 1992. Trump is a notoriously prickly man who can make three different decisions on one topic in a span of an hour. Not even his closest advisers and family members know what he is going to do after vacating the White House in about two months. Trump is reportedly mulling a 2024 presidential run to avenge a loss he considers fraudulent; one campaign adviser told the Washington Post this weekend that Trump could make an announcement in as soon as three weeks time.

Imagine Donald Trump acknowledging that he lost the election and placing a formal concession call to Joe Biden. Now imagine the defeated one-term president spending the next four years preparing to retake his old job back. Find it hard to believe? Don’t. Because at the same time Trump is denouncing the election results, complaining about the universe conspiring against him and pushing his campaign lawyers to file lawsuits about bogus voting irregularities, the 45th president is also talking about running again in 2024. If this was another one of those ridiculous stories for the rumour mill, people would have forgotten about it after 24 hours.

Three days after statisticians called the 2020 US presidential election for Joe Biden, the loser of that contest continues to sulk in the White House like a spoiled eight-year-old kid and is brooding about the result. Trump’s campaign may still be holding meetings and convincing themselves that the race isn’t over – Trump’s political advisers are reportedly discussing a series of television ads and rallies to sow doubt about Biden’s victory – but back on planet earth, the math is the math: whether or not you liked the result, Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. Even some of Trump’s own family members, including his wife, Melania, are trying to talk sense into him.

The Democratic Party was anticipating a blue wave this fall, a victory of such magnitude that Republicans would be spending the next two years fighting amongst themselves rather than controlling the purse strings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, was so confident of this blue wave scenario that she sent a memo to her Democratic colleagues outlining a list of bold policy proposals that unified Democratic government in Washington could achieve in the first several months. At the top of that list: a new coronavirus relief package and defending – and building on – the Affordable Care Act. Pelosi, however, got ahead of her skis.

The 2020 US presidential race was an ugly, ferocious dogfight. So it only makes sense for the contest to end the same way it started. Americans went to bed unsure who their next president was going to be. At the time of writing, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are neck-and-neck (223-212 in favour of Biden in the Electoral College tally) in most of the battleground states that will determine who emerges victorious and who will be forced into an early retirement. Trump did what he needed to do in Florida, winning by approximately three points in the perennial swing-state to keep his re-election prospects alive. It appears Trump will also pull out a win in North Carolina after trailing for most of the night.

It’s easy to turn on CNN or take a quick glimpse at the polls and just assume that Donald Trump is destined to become the first one-term president in nearly three decades. Some of my proud Democrat friends keep insisting to me that the former vice president Joe Biden will humiliate Trump with a margin of victory past presidential aspirants only dreamt of. Democratic strategists are confident of regime change in Washington DC — so confident, in fact, that they are starting to discuss possible candidates for key posts in a future Biden administration. You can’t blame them for believing the Trump era is irrepressibly doomed. Public surveys show Trump barely holding water in states that are traditionally considered strongholds for the Republican party.

With less than a week to go before Americans cast their ballots at polling places across the country, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are leaving it all on the field. Biden spent Tuesday in Georgia, a traditionally Republican state the former vice president nevertheless has a chance of swiping on election day. Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, was making a stop in the swing-state of North Carolina. Trump held another big rally in Wisconsin where he did his usual rant about how fake the news is, how mentally 'shot' Biden has become, and how strong the military now is thanks to his leadership.

Former Vice President Joe Biden had one job in tonight’s final presidential debate: tread water. Don't get rattled. If President Trump talks about your son, Hunter, as if he were an influence peddler or a Chinese Communist Party crony, take a breath and don’t take the bait. And definitely don’t get so angry that you provide Trump an opening to expand upon the attacks. For the most part, the long-time politician got the job done. Of course, just because Biden saved himself from getting goaded into a long discussion about his son’s alleged business dealings doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t return to the subject on a few occasions during the 90-minute debate.

President Donald Trump has been running from rally to rally like a headless chicken ready to cluck about his accomplishments. The only issue is there aren’t many accomplishments for him to run on. His campaign advisers are begging him to focus all his energy on the prospects of an economic comeback in the last two weeks of the campaign. The candidate, however, doesn’t take orders from his staffers very well. Rather than making his case for another four years in the White House, Trump is using this critical stretch of time calling the nation’s most respected doctor an 'idiot' and a 'disaster', unconcerned about the notion that assaulting Anthony Fauci’s character will further bleed his weak support among swing-state independents.

President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden were supposed to debate in front of the American public last night. The debate, however, was called off after Trump refused to do it via video link. So instead, Americans were treated to two different town-halls on two different U.S. television networks. While Trump was talking about conspiracy theories on NBC, Biden was talking policy on ABC. The former was part-absurd, part-therapy session. The latter was boring and frankly what you would think a typical presidential town-hall would look like. Trump won’t admit it, but he’s in trouble. As the coronavirus count gets higher, his poll numbers are getting lower and his electoral possibilities are getting grimmer.

Donald Trump was bewildered, frustrated, and downright exasperated. Addressing a crowd of red-hatted, hard-core MAGA supporters last night in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the president wondered aloud how it was even possible he could be defeated by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. 'I’m running against the single worst candidate in the history of presidential politics, and you know what that does?' Mr Trump surmised. 'That puts more pressure on me. Can you imagine if you lose to a guy like this? It’s unbelievable.' Unfortunately for Trump, losing to the former vice president is not only believable but exceedingly likely based on the direction the polls are going.

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor. Vice President Mike Pence is a career politician. The debate between them was always going to be less lively and dramatic than the name-calling last week between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But it wouldn’t be a snooze-fest – nothing in this election cycle is. Harris began the night with an impactful opening pitch: the Trump-Pence administration is a dumpster-fire sitting on a wrecked economy, a mountain of lies, and the worst pandemic in a century. Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been the ‘greatest failure of any presidential administration’ in history.

Donald Trump is back at the White House after a scary three-day stay at the Walter Reed medical complex. For the President, that’s the good news. The bad news: his bout with the coronavirus hasn’t won him any sympathy points from the electorate. In fact, his numbers have only gotten worse. CNN’s latest national survey saw Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden expand his lead to 15 percentage points. If the polling is any indication, Trump is four weeks away from being beaten like a drum a-la Jimmy Carter in 1980. For Biden, the last nine months have been a wild ride. There was a time not too long ago when the former vice president and three-time presidential candidate was a human seagull with a broken wing, struggling to take off.

'How is the president feeling?' shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. And yet over the last 24 hours, nobody could say with any clarity that Donald Trump was ill, on the mend, or perfectly fine. Even reporters with impeccable sources in the White House bubble were left flabbergasted as completely contradictory accounts emerged from multiple sources. Minutes after the president’s doctors emerged from the Walter Reed medical complex to brief reporters about a president coming back from the coronavirus strong and in good spirits, the White House chief of staff told the press that Trump’s condition was quite serious.