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Now it was printed. Reading the line for the first time, Trump denied it before launching into speculation about the origins of the story. “But that doesn’t mean John Kelly didn’t say that to Mike Bender,” he said, according to an adviser. “That doesn’t mean the others haven’t said it.”
The guessing game that Bender’s book sparked has added to the schisms and points of tension that have erupted in Trump’s orbit in recent weeks. As the deluge of Trump-related books hit shelves, the already tenuous alliances between the former president’s aides and associates have been strained even further. Former aides publicly attacked former allies while others sought to move away from a presidency they once dutifully served.
Fear is also mounting about the upcoming tea. In particular, Trump officials are eagerly awaiting the books to be published by real colleagues, including Presidential Advisor Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, who plan to write their own accounts of the Trump presidency.
“I think it’s difficult right now to know who is telling the truth,” a Trump adviser said. “They are all trying to go back in time and create their own images.”
Privately, former administration officials and senior campaign aides have shared their concerns about Conway’s next revealer in particular. The former staunch adviser to the ex-president is expected to report on her time in the White House and those with whom she worked. Conway herself sat down with Trump for her book in Mar-a-Lago.
Each end of presidency results in a sprint of reporters who covered it to tell the definitive story in the form of a retrospective book. But the Trump-related rush for work appears to be an avalanche from previous administrations. Over the past four years, there have been more than a thousand unique headlines about Trump, according to analysis shared with The New York Times by NPD BookScan in August 2020. But the most prominent reporters in the White House are expected to publish theirs. offers over the coming year. Already the Trump books published this week have climbed to the top of bestseller lists.
The sheer saturation forced the authors to publish a constant stream of scooplets from their books before publication. And while Trump’s White House is known, in real time, for its leaks, autopsies have revealed hitherto unknown infighting.
“I know there are still a lot of major snippets coming out in the future,” said a former senior administration official who took part in several book interviews. “The most interesting thing for me is how long the big scoops actually hold up to publication.”
Eager to put his own positive spin on the books, Trump agreed to sit with a parade of reporters in Mar-a-Lago. This included interviews with Bender, author Michael Wolff, Jonathan Karl of ABC News, reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times and Jeremy Peters, among others.
According to an adviser, Trump, who is sensitive to how history will remember him, “said I think if you can improve the book 3, 5, 10 percent [by participating], that’s important. “But the publications have, on the contrary, further clouded his re-emergence on the political scene. After months of keeping a relatively low profile, the former president took the lead and did interviews with friendly media in which he not only continued to falsely claim that the election was stolen from him, but also praised the insurgents who stormed the Capitol for his encouragement on January 6.
Those who know Trump suspect he is content to be the center of the conversation, no matter how unflattering, under the mantra that all press is good press.
“He thinks ‘Oh, they’re talking about me, me, me,’” one adviser said.
And yet, if Trump is happy with the new books on him, he hasn’t always shown it. In a statement released last week, the former president said sitting down with the writers was a “total waste of time” and insisted that “so many” stories were “pure fiction.”
He’s not the only one unhappy with the end product. Wolff’s book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Chairman,” sparked fireworks after it revealed that Republican National Committee chief counsel Justin Riemer said Rudy Giuliani and former lawyer for Trump’s campaign, Jenna Ellis, was a “joke”.
Since then, Ellis demanded that RNC President Ronna McDaniel resign and declare that she is quitting the Republican Party for not doing enough to support Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results.
“It’s no surprise that some Republicans are too weak to stand up for the truth,” Ellis told POLITICO. “I don’t care what they think. Anyone who sided with Ronna is simply posing as selfish politicians who have continued to undermine Trump and America for years.
Those close to Trump have dismissed Ellis’ proclamations as a transparent attempt to remain relevant after the election. And through a spokesperson, the RNC and Reimer both defended their work on election integrity. “I will say publicly now what I said then in private: I oppose people who have brought lawsuits that have not served President Trump well and given him the best possible chance in the courts.” , said Reimer.
Trump himself, meanwhile, published a series of attacks on his former attorney general William Barr after part of Karl’s book was published in the Atlantic. In the excerpt, Barr reportedly said he did not believe Trump’s allegations of widespread electoral fraud and felt it was his duty to share his point of view publicly.
“If there was any evidence of fraud, I had no reason to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion throughout the process was that there was nothing there. It was bullshit. “
More recently, Trump publicly bristled with another excerpt from Bender’s book, in which it was reported that he and former Vice President Mike Pence had argued over the hiring of political adviser Corey. Lewandowski. Bender maintained his reporting, which he said came from several sources.
As snippets and subsequent recriminations piled up, Trump’s relatives criticized Trump’s decision to cooperate with the book’s authors. Some remembered Trump giving Wolff and veteran journalist Bob Woodward access during his tenure as president, only to then explode on the material they ended up posting.
“I understand the reasoning, but it was a strategic error to sit down with these people – you give them credibility. It’s hard to say, “I sat down with them and they got it wrong.” So they created a sense of credibility that makes criticism more difficult, ”said Sean Spicer, former Trump press secretary turned host of Newsmax.
Perhaps feeling that it was a mistake to give content to some authors, Trump has, in recent days, taken to promoting the work of MAGA allies. On Wednesday, he published two rave reviews on the books of friends Mark Levin and Jesse Watters. Watters’s was so brilliant that it led to speculation on who wrote the review, only for Internet sleuths to point out that the book’s own publisher actually wrote the review. Trump had ripped it straight from the promotional webpage.
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