Maybe not simply projection about cheating:
Another aide, Jenna Ellis, regularly showed the president inaccurate information about voter fraud and encouraged his worst instincts by phone, while booking her own television appearances and rarely showing up at campaign headquarters. Parscale told others he had no control over her.
The entire campaign team in their attempts to get attention and approval (both from the president and for themselves) played to the President's own prejudices.
One of the downsides of Trump and Kushner’s decision to launch his reelection effort so early became fully apparent in the final stretch of the campaign. By officially filing papers on the day of his inauguration in 2017, Trump and his team immediately began repeatedly asking their small-dollar online donors for money — failing to realize that three years later, some of those donors would eventually max out, or grow fatigued from months of giving.
So there is a problem with how Trump had bleed dry his financial support.
Eric Trump's girlfriend took over the bundling operation (some sort of fundraising) but this was something of a disaster. She was toxic and upset people and put off fundraisers.
At least three of the four original regional directors left the bundling operation, in part because of what they described as an abusive work environment and requests to do things they did not find ethical, like promising meetings with Trump that they knew would not materialize.
They then spent a fortune appeasing the ego of the President rather than on effective campaign efforts
The campaign, meanwhile, burned through what money it did have like a “drunken maniac,” in the words of one ally. Under Parscale, the team spent roughly $10 million on a splashy Super Bowl ad, as well as smaller sums to fly pro-Trump aerial banners over beaches in swing states. The operation even poured money into flattering TV ads in the D.C. area, a decision intended to appease and flatter the president.
There was a point at which they started to have issues with money. The campaign team were under pressure to keep spending but:
By the time Stepien met with the campaign fundraisers and finance team, he had decided that if the campaign kept spending at the rate it was, and kept raising money at the rate it was, it would go broke several weeks before Election Day. He privately told people that if the campaign lost, it would be primarily because of money problems and secondarily because of the pandemic.
Stepien and his team discussed three choices: pull back on TV spending, make other cuts, or go into debt before Election Day. The situation grew so dire that Coby pushed to include the “88022” text message donation number in convention programming, but was rebuffed by White House officials.
The original campaign manager was demoted due to the campaign doing so poorly but Kushner who has something of a reputation like Chris Grayling didn't want to remove him completely from the team. Parscale subsequently lost the plot
Parscale, who had been demoted in July, remained on the campaign until a troubling incident in September, when he was hospitalized for his own safety after threatening suicide with a handgun during a confrontation with his wife at his Florida home, according to police. His wife said he had been drinking heavily and had been physically abusive toward her in previous days; police and a witness observed bruising on her arms. Parscale pointed to a statement later from his wife disputing that he abused her.
Not only that but Kushner was too busy and didn't listen out of his own arrogance
At times, critics say, Kushner was too occupied with his White House portfolio — trying to secure a peace deal in the Middle East, helping to manage the administration’s coronavirus response — to devote the necessary time to overseeing the campaign.
“He was busy being president,” quipped one Republican involved in the campaign.
One Republican close to the White House said that he and others had approached Kushner over the summer to warn of a coming loss and the need for a course correction. Kushner was polite but dismissive, saying the president had a good message and a solid team, and that the polls were overstating the potential for catastrophe.
Kushner calmly predicted that if Trump and his campaign executed their strategy correctly, he would win, just as he had in 2016.
This seems to be the very heart of the problem. Trump is surrounded by 'yes men'
With the exception of a small group — Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president who left her White House post at the end of the summer — there were few top staffers willing to offer Trump tough-love advice that he didn’t want to hear.
And if Trump can't accept the truth now, its in no small measure down to those yes men and those with dubious agendas of their own for whom Trump is merely a useful idiot. Steve Miller is known as a nazi sympathiser:
When Biden first announced Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) as his running mate, for instance, “birtherism” rumors — the racist claim that she was not born in the United States — cropped up in far-right, conspiracy theory circles. Some in Trump’s orbit, including senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, fed the misinformation to Trump. During an Oval Office meeting one day, Trump posed a question to the group: Did they think he should go after Harris with the claim?
Trump is a victim of conspiracy theories produced by others. He just amplifies them and uses the office of the president to legitimise them. You have to wonder how much he is really aware of reality outside what he watches on dodgy tv stations or is told by sycophants and those with troubling agendas. In some ways he's a hostage of his own cult success.
His ego and arrogance didn't help:
Trump also kept retreating to the nostalgia of his 2016 upset victory, and what had worked then. He reprised not only some of the same tactics — the divisive, racist and misogynistic rhetoric — but even the same targets, portraying himself as the victim and filling his rallies with snarling asides about the “Russia hoax” and Clinton.
And they didn't listen to key people at Fox (which may help to explain why they ditched him so rapidly as results came in)
And Fox News host Sean Hannity — who all summer had warned Kushner, Stepien and McDaniel that the campaign was faltering — texted suggestions, urging Trump to prepare rigorously, and raising additional concerns about the president’s standing and campaign strategy.
And
Trump’s team felt the final debate could be pivotal. Trump had called Fox News host Tucker Carlson in the wake of the first debate, and Carlson offered blunt advice that many in Trump’s orbit were afraid to give: that the debate had gone poorly, in part because it was a mistake for Trump to assume that he could rely on a faltering Biden to simply deliver him a victory.
Source:
www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2020/trump-pandemic-coronavirus-election/
The story is echoed with other similar examples in an article by CNN
amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/11/08/politics/donald-trump-loss-election-2020/index.html?__twitter_impression=true
Inside Trump's loss: A culmination of self-destructive decisions
Trump wouldn't or couldn't entertain the mere possibility of losing:
When the White House essentially relocated to Air Force One over the final weeks of the campaign, President Donald Trump had a common reaction whenever he saw his rival Joe Biden appear on one of the airplane's many televisions.
"Imagine losing to him?" he would ask no one in particular as he hurtled toward another regional airport in another battleground state, according to sources onboard.
Again it echoes how much Trump was surrounded by sycophants
But in the end, those closest to Trump accommodated his whims and obliged his obsessions, including his insistence on not wearing a mask in public and his demand to convene massive rallies as coronavirus cases spiked. Even viral contagion in the West Wing, and Trump's own three-night hospitalization with the disease, did little to alter his virus-be-damned approach.
And the overriding priority was not managing the campaign (nor Trump's expectations) but trying to pander to his ego and demands.
In a political operation where managing Trump's mood swings became a central responsibility, the task of presenting the President with realistic expectations fell to the wayside. As printers aboard Air Force One spat out charts and data in the final stretch meant to sustain the President's gusto, the more grim projections that showed his narrow electoral paths were left out, aides said. For a campaign whose financial troubles meant tough choices on where to place television ads, a reliable buy became the Washington cable market, where the President was certain to see.
Trump was in a position where he could only see how popular he was:
Even as recently as last week, Trump's advisers used tightening polls to convey momentum in their conversations with the President. He was motivated by the larger and larger crowds who gathered for his rallies, describing the scenes like a rock concert that repeated itself multiple times per day.
Even when Trump was asking the right questions his inner circle werent telling giving the response they should. It sounds a lot like they knew they were in trouble in Pennsylviania (i note seeing tweets after the polls closed about republican insiders saying they were gloomy about the chances of winning because things had gone badly in PA)
"How's Pennsylvania?" he asked repeatedly after advisers presented him with information about more favorable races in Texas and Florida, according to an official.
It didn't start well on the night
There were early signs the evening might not proceed as hoped. While 400 people had been invited to a would-be victory party on the White House state floor, far fewer actually attended, including several Fox News personalities and members of the President's Cabinet.
Trump did actually recognise he might be getting bad advise but didn't do anything to correct it himself ironically. I guess this speaks volumes of his laziness and the degree to which he was reliant on people who are around him to make their own money / spread their own agenda by using him. But he was also unwilling to take on responsibility for his own role in the campaign going badly.
The recriminations will almost certainly be led by Trump himself, who had from the beginning of the campaign questioned the strength of his team even as he ignored much of their advice and ran the type of race he preferred.
From the earliest days of the general election, Trump complained in private that Biden's staff was stocked with "killers" who he said made his own team look weak by comparison. While Trump has dismissed the campaign's financial concerns in public, in private he has asked his team how despite what he viewed as his own efforts at soliciting funds his campaign was falling behind Biden in cash.
Huddled with advisers in the Oval Office on a late April Friday, Trump screamed into a speakerphone at his then-campaign manager, Brad Parscale, berating him for a recent spate of damaging poll numbers and even at one point threatening to sue, people familiar with the conversation said.
At the time, Trump was fuming over an onslaught of criticism he was facing for suggesting a day earlier that ingesting disinfectant might prove effective against coronavirus. The episode illustrated what, to many, was Trump's unwillingness to internalize the self-harm he was inflicting while casting blame in all directions.
And what decent advice he got, he ignored
He similarly shrugged off prepared speech texts or talking points meant to hammer issues like the economy and law and order, choosing instead to wage a sustained attack on Biden's mental acuity and to air his litany of grievances, which framed him as a victim and were frequently met with only mild affirmation by his rally crowds.
And he fucked it
Trump departed the debate believing he had won, according to those familiar, but watching clips of himself on television afterward led to a realization he had badly erred. He conceded he could tone it down in subsequent encounters with Biden.
But a dispute over the format of the second debate led to its cancellation, an episode that Trump later conceded had been a misstep, given his comparatively stable performance in the final encounter. At the last debate, held in Nashville, aides set up his draped-off holding area with blown-up photos of his rallies, hoping the images of large supportive crowds would put him in a better mood.
Its quite possible that Trump only really saw reality directly in the hours after the election was called:
There weren't many supporters present when the President returned to the White House from the golf course on Saturday. Peering out the window of the same SUV, Trump instead saw crowds raising their middle fingers as he pulled through the gates.
I think all this is important to note in what is happening now and what will happen next.
There are four crucial dynamics here:
1/ How the Republicans are now split
2/ The personal interests of those closest to the President and what they have to lose
3/ The money issue
4/ The Georgia Senate Race
Trump is focusing all his efforts and fund raising on challenging the election result, but for the Republican party the crucial battle is actually the senate run off.
By doing this Trump is risking a huge amount for the Republicans. He's diverting fundraising away from the Senate run off and delegitimising the elections process which could result in lower turn out for the Republican party.
It has the potential under those conditions to be more like a British Parliamentary ByElection where turnout is vastly down on General Election turnout and the demographics of who turns out is hugely distorted. You tend to get an effect where people who think the election massively important will turn out but those who are indifferent or disengaged stay home. The danger for the Republican party is a highly motivated Stacey Abhrams and Black population just getting their first taste of the power and import