Trump goes out with a whimper and a tweet. It was always going to be that way

The end, for Donald Trump, has begun.

It came just as it had to, with that now all-too familiar mobile phone Twitter notification.

“In the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same,” Mr Trump tweeted, referring to GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, a loyalist who had been keeping the keys to Joe Biden’s transition under lock and key.

The outgoing president likely will never concede he lost to Mr Biden, now more officially the president-elect than at any point in the two weeks since he was projected the winner of a bitter fight with Mr Trump.

It’s just not in his personality, which has been so analysed and diagnosed by mental health experts, journalists, relatives and political observers. There’s little remaining question whether the 45th president has a massive ego, a willingness to bend the truth, and a stubborn insistence to put his own interests above even an entire country.

All three are true.

Truth feels like a strange thing now, after four years under a president who spewed falsehoods like a firehose.

He had uttered or tweeted 22,247 statements the Washington Post’s fact checker staff called “errants” just two weeks before Election Day, a figure that no doubt climbed again during his blitz of rallies in the days just before 3 November.

But by Monday evening, there was one truth that not even this former reality show host who so often was angered by realities he chose to ignore or revise – both in his own mind and on the public stage.

When Michigan election officials certified election results there that showed Mr Biden winning the state and its 16 electoral votes, it likely ended Mr Trump’s longshot bid to have hundreds of thousands of ballots invalidated in several key battleground states.

With Pennsylvania expected to certify its results in Mr Biden’s favour in the coming days, the door has all but finally closed on the president’s unprecedented attempt to cling to power from a White House residence he soon will vacate.

Closing with it will be one of the most chaotic, scandal-plagued eras in American political history. What’s next for Mr Trump is as unclear as when he will walk out of the executive mansion for the final time. But Trumpism will live on.

Several potential 2024 GOP presidential primary combatants already are jockeying for as large a slice of his conservative base as they can get.

Nikki Haley, the Indian-American former governor of South Carolina who was his first ambassador to the United Nations, wasted little time in going full coronavirus sceptic. As she eyes a White House bid, she weighed in on a Covid college football brouhaha from the weekend.