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Impeached for a second time, the president has few allies remaining.
HE LOST HIS FAVORITE means of communication, he lost the support of 10 House Republicans, he lost several formerly loyal soldiers to resignation, even Sen. Mitch McConnell reportedly said he'd committed an impeachable offense.
But that's not the end of it. The walls have continued to close around President Donald Trump in his final days in office. On Wednesday, he was impeached for a second time. But there was an unsettling quiet on the president's favorite medium, Twitter. As the impeachment debate continued on the Hill and nearly a dozen GOP lawmakers voted in favor, Trump couldn't complain to his followers – he was banned from the social media site only days before. Instead, he released a tweet-length statement as a press release (it didn't generate much buzz).
The typically boisterous, provocative president is quiet (at least to the outside world – reports suggest he is anything but quiet inside the White House) as his tenure tailspins to a close. And he's getting lonelier by the day as people and businesses reject him.
In more than a week since the mob of Trump acolytes overtook the Capitol, members of Congress – including a growing faction within his own party – called for his resignation or signaled they'll be supporting impeachment; two of his Cabinet secretaries resigned in protest along with several other members of the White House staff; social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook removed his accounts; the PGA stripped his golf courses from hosting sanctioned tournaments; and banks and business groups took pains to put space between themselves and the president.
The most symbolic blow came Wednesday, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city is severing its contracts with the Trump Organization – contracts that covered four sites and brought in about $17 million to the family business.
"The city of New York will no longer have anything to do with the Trump Organization," de Blasio said, underscoring the depth of abandonment from the city the president once called home.
On Wall Street, Deutsche Bank announced it would no longer conduct business with Trump or his company, other than continuing to oversee the repayments of existing loans totaling $300 million. The bank the president uses for his personal finances, New York-based Signature Bank, announced it had begun the process of closing Trump's accounts, worth $5.3 million, citing "displeasures and shock" following the riot. On Thursday, a third bank, Florida-based Professional Bank, announced that it, too, planned to cut ties with the president and his organization.
In Washington, D.C., House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California refused to whip Wednesday's impeachment vote, a sort of condemnation on its own and one that signaled a rare opportunity for his GOP caucus to vote as they see fit. In the end, 10 Republicans voted to impeach the president, including Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House.
The same scenario is playing out in the Senate, where McConnell said this week that the president committed an "impeachable offense" – though the Kentucky Republican stopped short of saying whether or not he plans to vote to convict him and punted the Senate trial to after Inauguration, when, notably, he'll no longer control the floor schedule.
Meanwhile, corporate donors, including AT&T, Comcast, Cisco, Home Depot, Morgan Stanley, Verizon and others, said they plan to cut off donations to the 147 Republicans who voted – at the behest of Trump – against certifying the 2020 election results.
"The biggest mistake anybody is going to make is try and rationalize what happened last week, what the president did and what that crowd did," Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot and a major Republican donor, told CNBC on Wednesday.
Langone, who contributed more than $1 million to a Senate Republican super PAC in the lead-up to the Georgia runoff, said he felt "betrayed" by the president.
All this as Trump's inner circle wilts away and his most ardent supporters, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, White House senior adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, economic adviser Larry Kudlow and others, have yet to publicly defend him.
As Trump visited the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this week in one of his last official photo-ops as president, he erected new walls of his own. According to The Washington Post, he is refusing to pay the legal fees of his personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, who criss-crossed the country to challenge the election results on the president's behalf and is reportedly billing him $20,000 a day.
With six days left before the president limps back into civilian life, without a social media platform or a presidential podium from which to communicate with his supporters, it's unclear how Trump will maintain his sprawling base and what role he'll play in future political endeavors – if he's even allowed to pursue them.
For now, it seems the only role he is being advised to play is that of a placater, advising the same supporters who ransacked the Capitol last week to stay clear of President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20, which he, too, has said he will not attend.
"In light of reports of more demonstrations, I urge that there must be NO violence, NO lawbreaking and NO vandalism of any kind," he said in a statement Wednesday. "That is not what I stand for, and it is not what America stands for. I call on ALL Americans to help ease tensions and calm tempers."
But as Trump sits inside the White House, his support dwindling and his potential post-presidency influence waning, the nation marches on. Outside of the White House, preparations continue for the Biden inauguration. A banner recently went up across from Trump's front door along the inaugural parade route: "2021 Biden Harris Inauguration." It was a stark reminder for a president whose lonely days are numbered.