Donald Trump likes to pretend he is still president — but his act caught up with him at Arlington

Over the weekend Donald Trump whined that the Harris campaign was treating him like the incumbent and it’s totally not fair:

The fact is that they are framing some of the campaign as a referendum on Trump. And why wouldn’t they? The former president is running on the lies about the alleged halcyon days when America was great (2017 -2019) and the vice president is running on “a new way forward” and “we’re not going back.” If he doesn’t want to be seen as the incumbent maybe he should stop pretending he is one.

From the moment Trump glumly flew off to Mar-a-Lago on January 20, 2021, he’s been acting like a president in exile. He flies around on a plane he calls “Trump Force One” and uses an ersatz presidential seal at any podium he stands behind. He insists on being called “Mr. President” (never “former”) and everyone around him treats him as if he still is. He’s been running a shadow government, with GOP officials rushing to get his permission before they take any action and everyone clamoring for his dispensation in their campaigns. One of the most obvious examples of his power over the GOP was his thumbs down on the painfully negotiated bipartisan border bill. He didn’t even pretend that it had anything to do with the policy, he just didn’t want Biden to be able to run on it as one of his accomplishments. He essentially vetoed the bill from his Gilded White House in Florida.

And he routinely meets with foreign leaders at his beach club as if they are there for an important state occasion. The events are small and somewhat tawdry (more like people dropping by to see the Duke of Windsor and Wallace Simpson back in the day) but he’s managed to persuade a number of his foreign allies to kiss the ring on the chance that he’ll be back in power soon and will deliver for them.

It’s not usual for presidential candidates to take a foreign trip to demonstrate that they can be presidential on the world stage. (Recall former Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s disastrous trip abroad just before he imploded in the 2016 presidential race.) But having foreign dignitaries come to the U.S. and pay homage to Trump at his Florida resort, as if they are supplicants, is something else altogether. Here’s some footage of a visit from Hungarian President Viktor Orbán last spring.

Trump recently met with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and staged a fake summit in what appears to be the Mar-a-Lago dining room:

He’s reportedly been talking to his pal Netanyahu in recent days discussing the situation in Gaza. I think it’s fair to assume that he may be exhorting him not to agree to a ceasefire or hostage deal in order to ensure Harris doesn’t benefit from any agreements before the election. After all, as we saw with the border bill veto, that’s his M.O.

And then there is the fact that he claims he is the rightful president having supposedly won the 2020 election. Millions of his followers believe that he won that campaign and that he should be sitting in the White House today — maybe forever. There are even people interviewed at his rallies who think he actually is the current president, pulling the strings from behind the curtain.

This week he performed one of the most audacious presidential acting jobs I’ve seen him do since he went into exile. In fact, when I first saw the footage I thought it must be from when he was in office:

He is not a real president yet he used Arlington National Cemetery this week as a campaign prop to hit his political opponent for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It later turned out that he was also taking smiling thumbs-up souvenir pics with unauthorized personnel, as NPR reported:

Trump’s crude spokesman Steven Cheung said it didn’t happen and accused the official of mental illness. Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita called the official a “disgrace.” Officials at Arlington told NPR that they’ve filed a report with local authorities.

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This is, of course, just the latest in a long line of Trump’s insults to the military. For someone who loves the idea of being commander in chief, he sure doesn’t have a high regard for the people who gave their lives in war. (Yes, “suckers and losers”.) It’s something I’ve always found a little bit mystifying. He loves cops. He loves uniforms. But he has absolutely no respect for service members, especially the brass. It’s odd considering that they are required to salute smartly and follow orders. You’d think he’d love that. But I suppose the fact that he issued so many illegal and maniacal orders that they had to object makes him angry.

There are exceptions, of course. The cracked former General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former Admiral Ronny Jackson and certain war criminals he pardoned and invited down to his resort. But for the most part, Trump was always uncomfortable around the military, maybe because it’s not in their nature to sycophantically tell him what he wants to hear. Even when he’s play-acting, as he was on Monday at Arlington, he can’t seem to get it right.

Trump has spent the last four years pretending to still be the president and continuing to dominate our political culture even though he’s really just some rich guy who lives in Palm Beach and likes to run for president. If he didn’t want people to think of him as the incumbent maybe he shouldn’t have acted like he was for the past four years.