President Trump reportedly spent much of Wednesday "cocooned" at the White House as his supporters stormed the Capitol, and his aides say he has become "mentally unreachable."
While a pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol building on Wednesday, disrupting Congress' session to certify President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election and leaving four people dead, Trump was "cocooned at the White House and listening only to a small coterie of loyal aides," all while resisting calls from advisers to condemn the rioters, The Washington Post reports.
"He kept saying: 'The vast majority of them are peaceful,'" an administration official told the Post. "'What about the riots this summer? What about the other side? No one cared when they were rioting. My people are peaceful. My people aren't thugs.' He didn't want to condemn his people."
Now, Axios reports that some of Trump's "stalwart aides and confidants" have "given up trying to communicate with him" altogether, "considering him mentally unreachable."
"His closest friends and paid White House officials — many of the Trumpiest Trumpers we know — are avoiding him like the plague," Axios writes, adding, "The president's final days in office will be lonely ones."
Although Trump did ultimately release a video on Twitter in which he called on those rioting in the Capitol to go home, the video also again included his false claims that the election was stolen. According to the Post, aides had asked Trump not to include these false claims in the statement, but he went off script and threw them in anyway. Ultimately, some aides believe Trump "did irreparable damage to his presidency and legacy," the Post writes, with an administration official saying, "He was a total monster today."