Eager to put his own positive spin on his disastrous presidency, Donald Trump agreed to sit down with a parade of reporters at Mar-a-Lago. That included interviews with Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, author Michael Wolff, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, and Jeremy Peters, among others. But excerpts from already published books signal that his attempt to re-write history completely backfired.
Now, according to Politico, the avalanche of coming books is reportedly making the twiced-impeached, one-term president anxious and worry about what’s to come his way, and he is furious.
Trump reportedly exploded after reading an excerpt from a new book — one of many about his presidency in the last few weeks — that described him telling his former chief of staff John Kelly that Hitler, for all his horrors, “did a lot of good things.”
The account came from Bender’s work, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” And for weeks, the former president had anxiously anticipated it surfacing. When Bender first approached him about it in the spring, Trump, through a spokesperson, told the Wall Street Journal reporter the anecdote was “defamatory.” Bender said he interpreted it as a legal threat; but like many such threats from Trump, nothing came of it.
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Sources close to Trump say the former president fears the next tea-spilling to come. In particular, Trump allies are anxiously awaiting the books set to be published by actual colleagues, chief among them counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway.
According to an adviser Trump is “privately concerned” about Conway’s upcoming tell-all in particular. The ex-president’s loyal former counselor is expected to give a hold-no-punches account of her time in the White House and those she worked alongside. Conway herself sat down with Trump for her book at Mar-a-Lago.”
The adviser told politico that, Trump, who is sensitive to how history will remember him, “said that I think if you can improve the book 3, 5, 10 percent [by participating], that matters.” But the publications have, instead, further muddied his reemergence on the political scene.”
Trump recently released a flurry of attacks on his former Attorney General William Barr after the publication of a portion of Karl’s book in the Atlantic. In the excerpt, Barr is quoted as saying he did not believe Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud and felt it was his duty to share his views publicly.
“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
More recently, Trump publicly raged at another excerpt from Bender’s book, in which it was reported that he and former Vice President Mike Pence got into a heated argument over the hiring of political adviser Corey Lewandowski.
As the excerpts and subsequent recriminations have piled up, people in Trump’s inner circle have criticized Trump’s decision to cooperate with the book authors. Some recalled Trump giving access to Wolff and veteran reporter Bob Woodward during his time as president, only to then erupt over the material that they ended up publishing.
“I understand the rationale, but it was a strategic mistake to sit down with these folks — you’re giving them credibility. It’s hard to say, ‘I sat down with them and they got it wrong.’ So they’ve created a sense of credibility that makes it harder to critique,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary turned Newsmax host.
“Perhaps sensing that it was a mistake to give certain authors content, Trump has, in recent days, taken to promoting the work of MAGA allies. On Wednesday, he issued two glowing reviews about books by friends Mark Levin and Jesse Watters. The Watters one was so glowing that it led to speculation about who wrote the review, only for internet sleuths to point out the book’s own publisher actually wrote the review. Trump had ripped it straight from the promotional web page.”
