Does Trump think he will be reinstated as president? [With Comment by John]

I don’ credit anything the mainstream media writes about Donald Trump. In most cases, I don’t assume what organs like the New York Times and the Washington Post say about the former is president is false — i.e., that it is “fake news.” But neither do I assume it’s true.

The mainstream media is now reporting that Trump still thinks he can overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. Trump-hating Maggie Haberman of the New York Times claims that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August.”

Along the same lines, the Washington Post reports:

[Trump] is increasingly consumed with the notion that ballot reviews pushed by his supporters around the country could prove that he won. . . .

Trump has rebuffed calls from some advisers to drop the matter, instead fixating on an ongoing Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona and plotting how to secure election reviews in other states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia, according to advisers.

Trump has become so fixated on the audits that he suggested recently to allies that their success could result in his return to the White House this year, according to people familiar with comments he has made. Some advisers said that such comments appear to be just offhand musings.

(Emphasis added)

I find it quite plausible that Trump is consumed with the notion that he won the 2020 race. I also find it plausible that Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were consumed with the view that they won their races for the presidency.

As for the claim that Trump thinks he can overturn the outcome of the 2020 race and be “reinstated” as president, I defaulted at first to my usual agnosticism about mainstream media stories on Trump. However, Charles Cooke at NRO says that, after speaking to “an array of different sources,” he can confirm that Trump “does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer.”

It’s inconsistent with Trump’s self-image for him to believe that he genuinely lost an election. By the same token, it may be inconsistent with that self-image for him to believe an election could successfully be stolen from him.

So maybe what Haberman and the Post are reporting is true. I’m filing this one under “pathetic, if true.”

JOHN adds: I am extremely skeptical of these reports, which all–especially the one from Charles Cooke–come from notorious Trump-haters, and are, of course, unsourced. I have spoken recently with a couple of people who have been with President Trump in the last few weeks, and they have said that he seems obsessed with the Democrats’ misconduct in connection with the 2020 election. As Paul suggests, that is understandable. But they have not reported anything to the effect that he thinks he somehow might be re-installed as president in the coming months. Such a belief would be more or less insane, and certainly Trump has said nothing of the sort publicly.

This theory is part of a left-wing campaign to smear conservatives with plotting a “Myanmar-style” coup to install Trump as president. Needless to say, no such coup is in prospect. In my opinion, this is all part of the usual far-left disinformation and should be disregarded.

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