Six months after Donald Trump exited the White House, a flurry of books are hitting stores that delve into the final year of his chaotic presidency.


What You Need To Know

  • Six months after Donald Trump exited the White House, a flurry of books are hitting stores that delve into the final year of his chaotic presidency

  • This past Tuesday, Michael Wolff’s “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” and Michael Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost”

  • And yet another book —  “I Alone Can Fix it: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year” by  Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig— will come out July 20

  • This month’s releases are being accompanied by an avalanche of excerpts that tell stunning, behind-the-scenes tales

The books cover a particularly tumultuous period for the Trump administration, as the former president responded to the COVID-19 crisis, saw protesters take to the streets nationwide to demand racial justice, unsuccessfully sought re-election, became infected with the coronavirus, lost and then tried to overturn the election, saw his supporters storm the Capitol, and then was impeached for a second time.

This past Tuesday, Michael Wolff’s “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” and Michael Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” And yet another book —  “I Alone Can Fix it: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year” by  Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig— will come out July 20.

Despite how unflattering the books are, the former president sat down for interviews with all of their authors.

And more books are on the way, including one from ABC’s Jonathan Karl and a tell-all from Trump’s former White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway.

This month’s releases are being accompanied by an avalanche of excerpts that tell stunning, behind-the-scenes tales. 

Here is a look at six of the claims. Trump’s office did not immediately respond to a Spectrum News email seeking responses to the allegations, but he and his representatives have previously issued statements for some of them. 

Fearing a coup

In “I Alone Can Fix It,” Leonnig and Rucker, who are reporters for The Washington Post, write that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told aides he feared Trump would call on the government to stage a coup after his election defeat. 

Milley “saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric of election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior,” the authors write.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. 

Milley and other Joint Chiefs generals even discussed resigning if they were ordered to participate in a coup, Leonnig and Rucker write.

“They may try, but they’re not going to f——-- succeed,” Milley said, according to the book. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”

In a statement, Trump said he “never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government,” adding that the story is “So ridiculous!"

Weakened by COVID

In “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter, writes that Trump was so sick when he was hospitalized with COVID-19 in October that chief of staff Mark Meadows asked staff to pray for him. 

According to Bender, Trump was so weak that he could only carry his overnight bag a few feet into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center before dropping it. 

“When it fell to the floor, the doctors, aides, and law enforcement officers around Trump all seemed to take a step back. It appeared to Trump as if they were nervous about his infection and didn’t want to touch his belongings,” Bender writes.

And not knowing how serious his illness was, the gaggle of reporters waiting outside the White House for him to head to the hospital made a pact that if he approached them, “they would insist he maintain his distance,” according to the book.

Praise for Hitler?

Bender also writes in “Frankly” that Trump praised Hitler in a conversation with former White House chief of staff John Kelly.

The alleged comment happened during a trip to Paris in 2018 to commemorate the armistice after World War I when Kelly was explaining to Trump who the allies and adversaries were in both World Wars.

"Well, Hitler did a lot of good things," Trump told Kelly, Bender writes.

Trump was "undeterred" and continued to defend the dictator by claiming he spurred economic gains in Germany, according to the book.

"Even if it was true that he was solely responsible for rebuilding the economy, on balance you cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler," Kelly reportedly snapped at Trump. "You just can't."

Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington has denied the conversation ever happened.

“It is made up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired," she told CNN.

‘Just say we won’

On election night, it was Rudy Giuliani who urged Trump to “just say we won,” according to Leonnig and Rucker’s “I Alone Can Fix It.”

The authors write that Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, asked campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior adviser Jason Miller and Meadows about where the races in Michigan and Pennsylvania stood. When told it was too early to say, Giuliani responded, “Just say we won,” the book claims.

“Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing,” according to the book. “Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.”

Meadows, the authors write, responded angrily: “We can’t do that. We can’t.”

Trump, of course, declared victory in the early-morning hours after election day and then proceeded to falsely claim he only lost because of widespread election fraud.

Furious about bunker story leak

According to Bender, the former president was so angry that someone leaked to the press that he was taken to the White House’s underground bunker during Black Lives Matter protests outside the White House that he told aides, “Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason! They should be executed!”

"Trump boiled over about the bunker story as soon as they arrived and shouted at them to smoke out whoever had leaked it. It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president," Bender writes in “Frankly.” 

Meadows tried to calm down the president by telling him, “I'm on it. We're going to find out who did it,” the book says. Trump repeatedly asked Meadows for days afterward if he tracked down the leaker, with one aide saying the president was “obsessed” with finding the source.

Fox’s Arizona call

Wolff writes in “Landslide” that it was Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch, after getting his father’s blessing by phone, who called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, a move that Trump has publicly blasted. 

According to Wolff, Fox’s independent election desk operation “was merely cover…to bypass the news desk and be directly answerable to the Murdochs.”

Just before giving Lachlan Murdoch the OK to call Arizona, his father grunted and said, “F—- him,” referring to Trump, Wolff writes.

Fox News has issued a statement saying: "This account is completely false. Arnon Mishkin who leads the FOX News Decision Desk made the Arizona call on election night and FOX News Media President Jay Wallace was then called in the control room. Any other version of the story is wildly inaccurate."

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