Donald Trump is capitalizing on his unusual status as both a former president and a candidate to twist the race in his favor in ways big and small.
Only five days after Donald J. Trump left office, one of his aides emailed a lawyer to request approval of a formal-looking seal for use on statements from the office of the 45th president.
Margo Martin, one of his closest personal aides, told the lawyer, Scott Gast, that consultants had designed a subtly-modified seal for Mr. Trump. “They said they changed a few things to avoid trademark issues,” she wrote, asking Mr. Gast if the design was acceptable.
The eventual image that Mr. Trump’s team used — a recognizable eagle from the Great Seal of the United States, placed in a circle — was evocative of the presidential seal that identified Mr. Trump with the job he had just left. And while he is hardly the first former White House occupant to affix an eagle to his website, the early conversations about presidential imagery revealed what has turned out to be an important obsession of Mr. Trump’s: being seen as much as a future president as a former one.
Mr. Trump vacated the White House before noon on Jan. 20, 2021, as required by the Constitution. But from the moment he arrived home to Mar-a-Lago, his members-only club in Florida, he has grabbed at every opportunity to inhabit the role of an incumbent president, including by putting the typical trappings of a post-presidency to use in trying to reclaim the office.
At a minimum, that approach may have helped to soothe Mr. Trump’s bruised ego. But it has indisputably become a crucial factor in his effort to return to power.
A majority of Republican voters, polls show, view Mr. Trump not as a “defeated former president,” as President Biden often calls him, but as a wrongly deposed president whose re-election would amend a grave injustice. Elected Republicans who once privately mocked the conspiracy theories about a stolen election now publicly insist that Mr. Trump was the true winner, out of fear of getting crosswise with their constituents or with him.
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Those aides and confidants were wrong. Far from ruining him, Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss — a monthslong fit of rage that culminated in a deadly assault on the Capitol — almost certainly helped secure his political future: It kept his grip on the Republican Party and allowed him to run his 2024 campaign as if he were the rightful occupant of the Oval Office pursuing no more than his restoration to power.
Mr. Trump — who has inhaled media attention like oxygen for decades — had no interest in the quieter, less visible life of other past presidents. George W. Bush took up painting and high-paid speeches. Barack Obama gave speeches, played golf, sailed with wealthy friends on superyachts and raised money for various causes, including a presidential library in Chicago.
Mr. Trump played a lot of golf, but the similarities end there.
By Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher
