Gulf of Queen Playing Soccer Reviewing the Guard With Trump
H istory is written by the victors but Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he was never going to go quietly. So when the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker requested an interview almost the last year of his presidency, Trump invited them to the palatial Florida estate he used to call his "winter White House".
The chat took place not in his individual office at Mar-a-Lago but in its gaudy vestibule as waiters assembled a cafe dinner including jumbo Gulf shrimp, oysters over water ice and bananas foster. A model of Air Force One, painted in Trump's unrealised redesign, perched on a java table. Club members – a Play a trick on News host and Donald Trump Jr'southward girlfriend among them – stopped to chat on their way to dinner.
"Trump seemed to love the idea that he was being interviewed as theatre," Rucker recalls by phone. "He could show off to his club members that these fancy reporters from Washington had flown down but to hear what he had to say. And he enjoyed the interview. He talked to us for ii and a half hours and and then he invited us at the finish to stick around for dinner and sent us to a table in the corner of the patio."
The upshot of this encounter in March, and private interviews with more than than 140 sources, is I Alone Can Fix It, a follow-up to Pulitzer prize-winning Leonnig and Rucker'due south bestseller A Very Stable Genius (both titles are direct Trump quotations loaded with irony). It is among a wave of books most Trump'southward disastrous final year hitting shelves just 6 months later on he left office.
I Alone Tin can Fix Information technology portrays a human being who put himself before his state. It is packed with hair-raising revelations about the 45th president'south mishandling of everything from the coronavirus pandemic (he has no regrets) to racial justice protests (his simply regret is non unleashing the active-duty military), but it made the most headlines with its business relationship of America's amour with fascism.
The central figure here was Gen Marking Milley who, as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had the monumentally important chore of keeping the military machine out of politics. His ailment took root when he joined Trump on a walk through Lafayette Foursquare for a photograph op at a celebrated church before long after the square had been violently cleared of protesters. He apologised, earning Trump's wrath.
Leonnig recounts: "Gen Milley had no idea when he walked out of the gates of the White House in his camouflage fatigues that he was joining in this fairly bizarre public relations staging and he went to sleep that dark making a pledge to himself and to some of his closest confidants and mentors that he was not going to let the military be used and played in that way once again for a political purpose."
She adds: "Equally the months went on, he became increasingly concerned that Trump would as well apply the armed forces to create chaos, to create fear as a distraction, to go along his grasp on ability – that fear at that place might be a coup. He vowed he would block that and he spent, according to our reporting, hours and hours monitoring the state of affairs at the White House and among fringe groups, trying to be sure that Donald Trump would not get that chance to get what he called 'the guys with the guns'."
Milley's concerns only grew when Trump refused to concede defeat to Joe Biden in the weeks afterward the November election. He became so worried that the president might endeavour to deploy the military to remain in ability that he and other superlative officials discussed ways to stop him, including mass resignations.
Trump has responded that he is "not into coups" and "never threatened, or spoke nigh, to anyone, a coup of our government", just to add that "if I was going to do a insurrection, one of the last people I would want to do information technology with is" Milley.
Milley even compared Trump'southward rhetoric to Adolf Hitler's during his rise to power in Germany, co-ordinate to the volume. "This is a Reichstag moment," he told aides, referring to the 1933 fire at the High german parliament which the Nazis used every bit a pretext to consolidate power. "The gospel of the Führer."
'It's unbelievable'
The inevitability of online discussions reaching for a Nazi illustration the longer they go along is known as "Godwin's police force". Journalists are usually discouraged from making such comparisons. And all the same here was America's highest-ranking armed services officer doing just that.
Rucker reflects: "Information technology would have been unfathomable for an American president to exist likened to Adolf Hitler. Just retrieve about the history of Nazi Federal republic of germany and the history of the The states and the different paths the two countries take taken and it's but remarkable to contemplate that now in the 21st century, in the year 2020, an American president would have such disciplinarian impulses and rhetoric and behavior that he would draw comparisons to Adolf Hitler. It'due south unbelievable."
Even earlier 2020, Trump had long been compared to autocrats around the world because of his mass rallies, willingness to promote false propaganda, harsh crackdowns on political protesters, contempt for media liberty, scapegoating of minorities, admiration for other strongmen and penchant for hiring family members and putting his name on buildings.
Leonnig says of interviews with first-hand witnesses: "They were quite concerned his get-to was an authoritarian impulse. One of the most horrific curses the president could hurl at any cabinet member or adviser was: you're weak, y'all're acting weak, or that's a weak thought. Being tough and being potent was so important to him.
"What nosotros've learned in the class of reporting for this volume and the ane earlier is the president really sidles up to and admires some of the almost authoritarian leaders in the world: Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He has an affinity for them."
She continues: "Many times we would exist surprised to learn that he was very worried almost how he looked to other international leaders, about as if he were on a playground and he was worried nigh what the other boys thought about him."
When Trump learned, for example, that his health secretarial assistant, Alex Azar, had bought millions of coronavirus vaccine doses from AstraZeneca, he was furious it was a British and not American company because Boris Johnson would express mirth at him. Leonnig adds: "Trump's aides were flabbergasted: why is he worried what Boris Johnson thinks about him buying a lot of vaccine to protect his countrymen?"
Just days after Milley's "Reichstag moment" warning, Trump addressed supporters at a rally in Washington and exhorted them to "fight like hell". He then returned to the White House and watched on Telly every bit they laid siege to the Capitol, breaching constabulary barricades, dandy windows and disrupting certification of Biden'southward electoral college win.
Rucker recounts: "For a while at that place he liked what he was seeing. People who were familiar with how he reacted to the television images said he was happy, that he thought it was a beautiful thing to encounter so many of his supporters acting with such strength, waving his flags, wearing his hats, marching on the Capitol in his name. It was a beautiful sight for Trump.
"When things got actually very fierce and mortiferous he, co-ordinate to our sources, realised that this was a problem and yet he didn't actually deed and practise annihilation. He was finer awol. He had abdicated his responsibleness as commander-in-chief in that moment. And and then when it came to organising a federal response – law enforcement and military and national baby-sit – to try to regain control of the Capitol and to bail out those outnumbered Capitol police officers, it wasn't Trump who did any of that coordination."
Instead it was left to Vice-President Mike Pence, held in a secure location underground, who worked the phone with leaders at the Pentagon and other senior officials in the government to coordinate the response and save the Capitol.
"Trump, according to our reporting, had no such communication with the Pentagon," Rucker says. "He had no communication with the vice-president. He only sat there watching telly."
Trump'south daughter Ivanka was at the White House and growing concerned. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, urged her to pressure the president to publicly back law enforcement and tell his supporters to become dwelling house. Simply she was neither forceful nor effective.
Leonnig says: "Lives were in the balance and it was taking hours for the president of the United States to say anything. Some people likened Ivanka to a stable pony with a racehorse: she'south being brought in to calm her father and go him trotting at the right pace."
'For some sick reason I enjoyed it'
No one, information technology seems, can halt Trump's blind gallop. Even later the horror of that solar day – five dead, more than than a hundred injured, members of Congress fleeing for their lives – he told Leonnig and Rucker in their interview: "There was a lot of love. I've heard that from everybody. Many, many people have told me that was a loving crowd."
Trump was equally convinced that he won the 2020 presidential election, even though his attorney general, state election officials and numerous judges threw out his bogus claims of voter fraud. It has become known as "the big lie". So, is he knowingly lying or does he genuinely believe this stuff?
Leonnig comments: "Phil and I spoke to so many people within the administration who literally were at his shoulder day in, mean solar day out, and they told the states they are not sure what he believes. They had his ear, they still are not completely persuaded that he believes this, although I must say that when Phil and I were with him in Mar-a-Lago, I was strangely impressed by how completely the one-time president said all of these things nigh the ballot beingness rigged with a completely committed and straight face up.
"Many of the things that are admittedly without whatsoever basis in fact – were looked into, run to ground and rejected past his attorney general – he still says are true. And his commitment to those lies physically is as if a person actually believes it."
This was the alternative reality bubble that the authors found at Mar-a-Lago, where upward is down, two plus 2 equals five and a twice-impeached one-term president milks regular standing ovations. Leonnig and Rucker remember that after the interview and dinner, Trump offered to invite them back if they had any follow-up questions and admitted: "I enjoyed it actually. For some sick reason I enjoyed it."
A vanishingly rare glimpse of cocky-sensation from the man who loves to hate the press?
Leonnig muses: "I think he recognised that, despite us existence part of what he dubs the false news media, he needs us and enjoys talking about himself."
-
I Lonely Can Fix Information technology is published in the Usa past Penguin and in the UK past Bloomsbury. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/25/i-alone-can-fix-it-carol-leonnig-philip-rucker-trump-book-bestseller
Post a Comment for "Gulf of Queen Playing Soccer Reviewing the Guard With Trump"