Damage Control? Advisers Claim Trump’s Belief He’ll Be Reinstated to Presidency This Year Really Just ‘Offhand Musings’
Advisers to former President, recent ex-blogger, and current Florida resort proprietor Donald Trump appear to be doing some damage control by claiming that Trump’s [delusionally false] belief he’ll be reinstated to the presidency this year constitutes “offhand musings.”
New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman touched off a firestorm this week with a tweet that read “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August,” a notion that Haberman herself later noted had the potential to incite violence.
Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021
That item has been a top story for several days, although the claim itself was unsourced and unattributed. But on Thursday night, The Washington Post published an article — by Josh Dawsey and Rosalind Helderman — that did include some sources, some of which appeared to be trying to soften the impact of Haberman’s reporting.
Entitled “Trump has grown increasingly consumed with ballot audits as he pushes falsehood that election was stolen,” the article contains a brief passage relating to the reinstatement delusion. According to WaPo, “allies” of Trump are embracing his claim of potential reinstatement, while “advisers” are playing it down:
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.
The episode reveals the perils and benefits of “access journalism,” wherein disparate sources can push disparate messages with the benefit of anonymity. On its own, it doesn’t have a lot of value — Trump’s allies want his supporters to believe that reinstatement is on the table, while Trump’s advisers appear to want everyone else to believe this is just harmless banter.
But in context with the rest of WaPo’s reporting, it stands to reason, as Haberman noted in a follow-up tweet, that Trump isn’t obsessing over specious election “audits” as some sort of academic exercise. And the competing messages aren’t necessarily in conflict — they’re simply directed at different audiences.
