The Inside Story Of Trump's Delusional Three-Month Slide Into Outright Fascism And Eternal Loserdom!

This outstanding reporting comes from Axios, yes we said Axios.

Twenty twenty twenty four hours to goooo, Trump might need to be sedated ... nothing to do, nowhere to goooo-oh ...

Oh hello! We're almost to the 24-hour countdown, where you start seeing footage of the ball drop in Australia and all the people cheering because at least where they live, Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States. Or at least they should do it that way.

While we're waiting, Axios, yes Axios, has been publishing an outstanding   ongoing series with original reporting on Trump's unraveling, his utter collapse, and his descent into utter loser and victimhood, from his historic loss on election night to his present status as a twice-impeached loser whose legacy will be the terrorist attack he incited on the US Capitol on January 6.

Apparently it goes with a podcast, so that's exciting if you're into that sort of thing. Being Axios, though, each dispatch is little and bite-sized, just the 100-calorie snack pack of news you need to get through your day with the appropriate level of Trump schadenfreude .

Episode One: The Great En-Lose-ning Begins!

Axios says in Episode One that Trump's unraveling officially started when Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Trump was indeed planning to "exploit" and "weaponize" the idea of a red mirage that night, where in-person vote totals looked better for him, to start his narrative that the election was rigged. But things went to hell when Fox News was first to realize Biden had flipped Arizona, on election night. By the end of the night, it was clear that "red mirage" would not work so well for Trump, so at 2: 20 a.m., he went out and lied, "Frankly we did win this election," even though his then-favorite news network had been the one to drop the electoral turd in his punchbowl early and often.

He was a big loser.

Episode Two: Attack Of The Clones! We Mean Krakens!

 Episode Two is where it starts to get more fun. The real campaign people were telling Trump there was an actual longshot way to steal the election by making Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin go their way. But the Kraken lawyers were already in the room:

A bizarre routine set in. These meetings would begin with official staff raising plausible legal strategies. Then [Rudy] Giuliani and [Sidney] Powell, a lawyer with a history of floating "deep state" conspiracy theories, would take over, spewing wild allegations of a centralized plot by Democrats — and in Powell's view, international communists — to steal the election.

Bewildered campaign aides would look around the table at one another, silently asking what the hell was going on.

And then they would leave. And then Rudy Giuliani would be like HEY WHERE EVERYBODY GO? DOIN' A BIG IMPORTANT KRAKEN MEETING!

Eventually, Giuliani would realize that he and his crew were alone in the conference room. He'd walk down the hall and knock on the glass outside [campaign manager Bill] Stepien's office, where about eight aides had squeezed onto a pair of couches. "You guys, where did you go?" Giuliani would say. "This is serious!"

And Trump believed them, because his Stable Genius brain is broken. He was already too far gone for them to try to steal the election in a "normal" way. He needed to believe the crazyass lies, because otherwise he was left whining things like "Can you believe I lost to that fucking guy? That fucking corpse?" But Axios says even in private, he clung to his denial like a gun and a Bible.

Somewhere in there, everybody else declared Trump the biggest loser of Arizona.

Sometime after that, there was a press conference at a landscape company on the outskirts of Philadelphia that claimed otherwise.

Episode Three: It's Not That On Some Level Trump Didn't Know Sidney Powell Was Batshit ...

He did, according to Axios in Episode Three! 

President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in from lawyer Sidney Powell. "Ugh, Sidney," he told the staff in the room before he picked up. "She's getting a little crazy, isn't she? She's really gotta tone it down. No one believes this stuff. It's just too much."

He put the call on speakerphone for the benefit of his audience. Powell was raving about a national security crisis involving the Iranians flipping votes in battleground states. Trump pressed mute and laughed mockingly.

"So what are we gonna do about it, Sidney?" Trump would say every few seconds, whipping Powell more and more into a frenzy. He was having fun with it. "She really is crazy, huh?" he said, again with his finger on the mute button. [...]

"Sometimes you need a little crazy," Trump told one official.

We hate all these people but we enjoy the mental image of Donald Trump muting the phone so he could make fun of Sidney Powell to everybody else in the room.

But at core, he was still the tiniest man in the room, the one who couldn't accept that he had indeed lost the election to Joe Biden, and hard. So he kept listening to them.

Apparently America had no idea just how close Sidney Powell came to getting a high-level security clearance, so she could investigate her QAnon-infused hallucinations about a "foreign conspiracy to steal the election involved a coordinated cyberwarfare attack from China, Russia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea."

Really.

Episode Four: Bill Barr Is Good Now! Did You Hear Bill Barr Is Good?

We are just going to say that we are curious who Axios's sources are for this, considering how well former Attorney General Bill Barr comes off. Was it some secret source named "Mill Carr"? "Dill Farr"? "Hill Garr"?

Attorney General Bill Barr stood behind a chair in the private dining room next to the Oval Office, looming over Donald Trump. The president sat at the head of the table. It was Dec. 1, nearly a month after the election, and Barr had some sharp advice to get off his chest. The president's theories about a stolen election, Barr told Trump, were "bullshit."

White House counsel Pat Cipollone and a few other aides in the room were shocked Barr had come out and said it — although they knew it was true. For good measure, the attorney general threw in a warning that the new legal team Trump was betting his future on was "clownish."

That was the day Barr showed up at the White House after the AP released the interview where he said he hadn't seen anything remotely suggesting irregularities in the election that could sway it Trump's way. Aren't you glad Bill Barr puffed his chest out like a big toad and said "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH" to Trump? We are sure glad for that.

Here is how Trump reportedly reacted to Barr's AP interview:

"Why would you say such a thing? You must hate Trump. There's no other reason for it. You must hate Trump," the president charged, speaking about himself in the third person.

Haha, we believe that, because that idiot does talk about himself in the third person.

In this episode we learn that Barr also was really against Trump's fantasies this summer about declaring war on Portland, and he didn't want to send in the military. Trump yelled at him back then, "No one supports me!" and "No one gives me any fucking support!" Bill Barr is just really good. Did everybody hear how Bill Barr is GOOD? "They fought all summer," says Axios. And that it "was always Groundhog Day trying to explain things to Trump." Because Bill Barr is GOOD.

There are other things in that episode about how Bill Barr is good, but we don't care.

Thanks for your service, Bill, now go away.

Episode Five: So Why Was Trump Trying To Stick One Of Devin Nunes's Idiots At CIA, Who What Now?

Episode Five discusses that whole thing involving Trump's grand plan to get Gina Haspel out at CIA to be replaced by Devin Nunes's absolute favorite idiot Kash Patel, who most recently was the star of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's White House notes on How To Coup For Dummies.

They originally fucked the goat on that one back in December, apparently:

In his final weeks in office, after losing the election to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump embarked on a vengeful exit strategy that included a hasty and ill-thought-out plan to jam up CIA Director Gina Haspel by firing her top deputy and replacing him with [Kash Patel,] a protege of Republican Congressman Devin Nunes.

The plan stunned national security officials and almost blew up the leadership of the world's most powerful spy agency. Only a series of coincidences — and last minute interventions from Vice President Mike Pence and White House counsel Pat Cipollone — stopped it.

Oh good, Mike Pence and Pat Cipollone stopped Trump from firing Gina Haspel and installing an absolute moron! Aren't you glad Mike Pence and Pat Cipollone are good like Bill Barr? You are glad about that.

Apparently all these weird last-minute firings and replacements with Devin Nunes's idiots come down to how Trump, in his galaxy brain, is just CONVINCED that there are documents lying around everywhere that say Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did the Deep State to him. And if that proof is out there, then it must be declassified!

Therefore Trump is just pretty sure the idiots he stuck into the Defense Department (and we guess the NSA ) will unquestionably obey his HEREBY ORDERS to declassify these documents that definitely exist.

So watch for some bullshit declassifications later today, probably!

The documents will not say what Fox News says they say.

Episode Six: Trump Fucks Georgia, Fucks Self, Orders Terrorist Attack On Capitol, Gets Impeached, Will Be Gone In 24 Hours

 Episode Six is about how Trump lost Georgia for himself and for Mitch McConnell and for the entire GOP.

Key excerpt:

Less than 48 hours after Trump's Georgia rally, both races had been called for the Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. The Republicans had lost control of the Senate.

Trump was right that everyone would blame him. After all, he had spent months puncturing confidence in the voting system, turning his fire on Georgia's own GOP leadership, and obsessing over states that he had lost fair and square.

He had allowed outsiders and conspiracists to supplant the professionals around him. He had fed a national sense of mistrust, rage and despair. Georgia was the last state where Trump would take his stand.

He was about to incinerate his legacy. Within 24 hours, the feral ground troops the president had summoned to execute his fantasy of overturning the election would storm the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Womp womp.

That episode came out this morning. It's not that exciting, otherwise. Will there be more episodes? Probably!

As we publish this, we are learning that Trump, as part of his further unraveling, is just really upset about how all these big awesome performers are going to do Joe Biden's inauguration, when literally nobody wanted to perform at his, which wasn't during a global pandemic.

You happy now, Axios? We free-advertised your dumb podcast. Now give us the million American dollars we did not agree you would pay us to write this post.

[ Axios ]

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