BooksReviewABC News’s chief Washington correspondent is a sure guide to the former president’s rise and the enduring threat he poses
In his new book, Jonathan Karl captures Donald Trump gloating. “She said she could never get crowds like that,” the former US president turned de facto Republican presidential nominee is quoted as saying, after a conversation with Angela Merkel, then chancellor of Germany.
“In fact, she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.”
One Republican congressman, Karl notes, was left wondering whether Trump understood that Merkel was alluding to Adolf Hitler.
Asking: “Which would be more unsettling: that he didn’t or that he did?”, Karl leaves the reader to judge.
When news of the exchange came out, Trump world was quick to push back. A campaign official attacked Karl – chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and author of two previous books on Trump – as “disgraceful and talentless”. The official added: “This filth either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”
The unnamed aide omitted two other possibilities: placing Karl’s book in your hands or on your bedside table. Tired of Winning is worth reading. It is well-paced, meticulously sourced and amply footnoted. Karl’s third installment on the Trump presidency and aftermath shines a needed light on how the Republican party has been recast and reshaped. Subtitled Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, it is an all-too-rare case of truth-in-advertising.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s brain and muse, talks on the record, making it clear that as long as Trump is alive, the party of Lincoln belongs to him. Confronted by a Republican grandee who suggested Trump play less of a role in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Bannon remembers unloading: “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“They don’t understand his psychology,” says Bannon. “Whether you like it or not, it’s a reality you have to deal with.”
So, Karl writes: “I said … it has to be Trump as long as … ”
“‘As long as he can fog a mirror’, Bannon said before I could finish the sentence.”
With Trump and the GOP, it’s till death do us part.
Bannon shares his disdain for Mike Lindell, one of the more pathetic characters in Trump’s orbit. The MyPillow guy and a passel of so-called “prophets” mistakenly claimed Trump would be “reinstated” as president during Joe Biden’s first term. Lindell boasted of holding receipts but never delivered. Bannon played along, until he didn’t.
“‘I knew we had a problem when Kristi Noem [the Republican governor of South Dakota] had a previously scheduled appointment before that cyber symposium in Sioux Falls,” Bannon yucks to Karl, about one of Lindell’s attempts to prove supposed election subversion. “She couldn’t come down and give us 10 minutes?”
Like Lindell – like Trump – Bannon faces legal woes. He awaits sentencing for contempt of Congress and is set to stand trial in 2024 in New York on felony fraud and conspiracy charges. Elsewhere, Karl reminds the reader of Trump’s fondness for defamation and disdain for the truth. In last year’s Georgia US Senate race, for example, he repeatedly counseled Herschel Walker, a protege and one-time college football and NFL star, to falsely label the Rev Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Democratic senator, as a “child molester”.
“But I got no evidence of that,” Walker pushed back.
Trump was undeterred.
“Just do it,” he said. “Just call him a child molester.”
Before election day, Walker, who had a documented history of domestic violence, punted on Trump’s advice. The runoff was different. Walker let loose with the garbage furnished by Trump.
“This young man said there was sexual abuse and there was physical abuse,” Walker told a crowd, apparently referring to claims about alleged events at a youth camp. “Who did that? It has to be Senator Raphael Warnock, because he was responsible for it.”
It was a lie. Warnock eked out a narrow win.
This year, a Manhattan jury found Trump defamed and physically abused the writer E Jean Carroll, who said he attacked her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Next year, just as the Republican primary gets under way, he will face a second civil suit in the matter.
Karl is anguished by the havoc Trump has wrought.
“All too many people have begun to forget how desperately and madly Donald Trump tried to cling to power and what he was willing to do to avoid being branded a loser,” Karl writes. “Whatever guardrails may have existed before are gone. Trump is more detached from reality than ever and more willing to trash the norms and customs that our system of government needs to survive as a working democracy.”
And yet, in five of six electoral battlegrounds, Trump leads Biden in polls. The public views the US president as too old and Kamala Harris, his vice-president, as a lightweight.
Trump vows to weaponize the justice department and the FBI. He embraces the rhetoric of the Confederacy as he vows retribution. He parrots Hitler as he unleashes on the “enemy within” and brands opponents “vermin”.
Americans should be alarmed, but not surprised. More than 30 years ago, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, let it be known that he kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by the bed. In the White House, Trump reportedly told John Kelly, then his chief of staff, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”.
Once upon a time, Bannon, like Merkel, likened Trump’s public persona to that of the Nazi dictator. In June 2015, when Trump made his history-making escalator ride into the Republican primary, Bannon thought of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film. As another author reported: “That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.”
Tired Of Winning by Jonathan Karl (Penguin Putnam Inc, £28.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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