Nonetheless, it seemed at times like Mr. Trump was already president, in large part because Mr. Biden has faded from the scene so quickly.
This was Mr. Trump’s second full news conference at Mar-a-Lago since he began forming his government, and in that respect, it follows tradition: Mr. Biden held a number of news conferences in Delaware four years ago, denouncing Russia for its “Solar Winds” hack of a critical piece of American software and then expressing horror at the violence wrought at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But in the past six months, Mr. Biden has ceded the stage, making Mr. Trump’s voice all the louder, his influence all the greater. The last lengthy Biden news conference came last July, after the NATO summit in Washington, and his aides were white-knuckled through the whole thing, fearful he would freeze up again as he did on the stage debating Mr. Trump in June.
When Mr. Biden issues executive orders these days, they are issued on paper or an email; he rarely talks about them, or take detailed questions. He has never spoken publicly on the Chinese hack of the American telecommunications companies, which his aides describe as perhaps the most urgent new national security threat of the past six months. (Curiously, neither has Mr. Trump, who could make a clearer case for why the hack of the innards of the American communications systems is a threat to American government and private industry than he could about long-existing Chinese ports near the Panama Canal.)
With the departing incumbent fading from view, Mr. Trump seems to sense that if he takes the stage, there will be no one to push back on his interpretation of recent history. He is rewriting that history quickly, just as he recast the events of Jan. 6, in hopes that his election was evidence that Americans believe he was pursued by prosecutors out of vengeance, not the application of justice.
“That’s a sick group of people, and it was all to influence the election,” Mr. Trump said of the investigations led by Jack Smith, the special counsel. “It was all a fight against their political opponent. We’ve never had that in this country. We have had that in certain countries. We’ve had that in third-tier countries.” Inevitably, he started talking about “banana republics,” a familiar line from the first term. Some things don’t change.
