Bulwark Takes - Stunning Reveal: Trump Biographer Details Secret Oval Office Meeting In 2020 On Comeback

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Sam Stein sits down with Alex Isenstadt, veteran political reporter and author of Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power. They discuss details of a stunning Oval Office meeting in December 2020, where Trump signaled his plans for a 2024 comeback while shaping the narrative of election denial.

Hey guys, me Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I am joined by truly one of the industry's finest reporters, one of the finest gentlemen that I've had the pleasure of working with, Alex Eisenstadt, now at Axios. Alex and I worked together at Politico. I had the joy of being his editor, but we're not here to talk about that, although I'm sure we could. We're here to talk about Revenge, the inside story of Trump's return to power. It's Alex's new book. It is available on Amazon. Go get it. It's going to be great. Already some excerpts have come out that we'll talk about here. Before we get into that, subscribe to the feed. We appreciate the subscription. Alex, how's it going, bud? You good? Good. Thanks for having me. Excited to do this. Yeah, I'm sure you are.

Let's talk about revenge. Before we get into the part that we're going to be writing about or that we've written about at The Bulwark, tell me about the process of writing this book and why you feel like – because there's so much Trump literature out there, right? I mean, the guy's probably covered more than any president, frankly, ever. What do you think this has to offer that other books have not done so far? Sure. So my goal in writing this book was to provide readers a fly on the wall account of Trump's 2024 campaign. And the book starts in the days actually before January 6th, and we're going to be getting to that, I know. But to really provide readers with a sense of how did he mount this remarkable political comeback and to give people a sense of how he did it, the people around him, what were some of the tales that happened. And to give people a sense of how he did it, the people around him, what were some of the tales that happened. And what I found was, was that there's a lot of things

that happened in this campaign that people don't know about. What I also found was that there's a lot of things that happened in this campaign that people don't know about that sheds light right now on how this White House is working and the kinds of things that Trump wants to pursue over the next four years. What are some of them? I mean, because he is so thoroughly covered. It's strange to me that there could still be misconceptions about him and his motivations and also about his path back to power. But as you went about doing this, what were some of the main ones that you felt like the public understanding of Trump or the people around him is just wrong

and it just misses the mark? Right. One of the arguments I make in the introduction to this book is that Trump has deeply polarized the country. There's not a lot in between on this guy. You either love him or you hate him. It's hard to find people who are in the middle. They do exist, but it's hard to find them. Well, yeah, I was going to say there's been

people, I mean, we've had them in the focus groups. Like there's people who've crossed over from Biden and Trump. They do exist. There's people who just don't pay attention politically and they like, you know what, I'm willing to shake thing up. But I will grant you that obviously deeply polarizing guy. There he, but whatever you think of him and whatever one thinks of him, rather, it's that he has he's really one of the most remarkable political athletes of all time. That may put aside the question of how he governed. And there's a lot of questions about that right now. But if you look at his ability to campaign, his ability to fight, he is without question one of the greatest political athletes of all time. And what he saw before anyone else saw was that there was a deep-seated desire in

this country, a deep-seated anger at the elites in places like Washington, in places like New York, San Francisco, LA, that have felt very much a part of the population that feels very much alienated from those power centers. And he understood those people and he understood how to activate them and how to rally them to his side. And it's a pretty remarkable story if you think about how he mounted that comeback yeah i mean if you just the way you're talking about it's kind of interesting because like i mean at his heart he is of both those power centers right new york real estate tycoon television uh personality had a hit show, obviously. Business icon. And then president.

I can sit here and make the case that he's more establishment than anyone who's ever held the Oval Office before. And yet, of course, to your point, he's managed to somehow – not somehow. He's successfully convinced millions upon millions of people that he is, you know, definitionally anti-establishment. Right. A blue collar billionaire. A blue collar billionaire. And if you look back on his campaign and one of the things I try to illustrate in this is that almost every single thing he did was geared towards this idea that he was going to be a vessel for people who were anti-establishment, who felt alienated from elites. And he became one of them himself, and he used himself to be a vessel for a lot of the

frustrations that were going on. Does he identify that way? Or is this in your reporting? Is this him making strategic political choices? Probably a little bit of both, to be honest with you. If you look at, he does genuinely see himself as being ganged up upon by the political class, by the legal class. He does see that. But he also very much sees, he went through a lot of political calculations. And one of the things you'll see is when you read this book is the degree to which certain events were deeply orchestrated by him and by this campaign. What do you mean by orchestrated? Orchestrated meaning you look at, for example, the first indictment when he was indicted in the Stormy Daniels case and when he was making that car ride from Trump Tower to the

prison in New York City or to when he turned himself in, rather. That was something that was planned out in advance by the Trump campaign for days, if not weeks in advance. They worked very closely with TV networks. They wanted to turn this into, they literally talked about how to turn this into the next O.J. Simpson slow speed chase, that he was deeply involved. He wanted to know where the camera angles were. And so there was a tremendous amount of theater involved in this campaign. And it was all geared towards this idea of presenting himself

as a victim and someone who can identify in a very deep, profound, emotional way with his supporters. There was one other event in this campaign that I think wasn't covered quite enough. And looking back on it, it was that visit to the Ohio train derailment site. And that was a really pivotal moment in this campaign in terms of, one, it did solidify that relationship looking back now between Trump and J.D. Vance. It was clearly important for that reason. But it was also a moment where he could go out and do these photo ops and use it to identify with people who at a train derailment site felt that the federal government had failed them and that Joe Biden hadn't been doing enough and Pete Buttigieg hadn't been doing enough after this train derailment.

And so that was actually after a very rough period for Donald Trump, right? You look at what happened when he started out this campaign. It was an abject disaster. It was an abject disaster the way he started out this campaign. It was Kanye West. He had- McFuente's dinner, Kanye West. He was potentially, in some polls, trailing DeSantis. There was questions about whether the party would actually... Oh, and also, of course, the 2022 midterm results had gone incredibly poorly relative to expectations. He had a post about terminating the Constitution.

He did this thing with baseball cards. I don't know if you remember, but it was like an NFP thing. Yeah. And one of the things that I illustrate in this book was that there was profound concern at the top of his campaign that Trump was way off the rails at this point, way off the rails. And there was concern that if he didn't get things in order, his campaign could be over just about two months after he started it. And so it was that trip to Ohio, that photo op that really turned things around from him. And so if you look at all the key moments in this campaign up to the very end moments where he showed up at a McDonald's or identified himself with trash collectors, it was all geared this idea that if he put himself out there enough

as a working a man of the working class that people would come to believe it uh you talked about the issue of victimhood and that's a good way to um segue into into the thing into the part of your book that we wrote about um and i'm fascinated by it because you you have this scene i'm going to set the stage and then I want you to sort of explain what happens here. The scene is it's early December 2020. Okay. Biden has won the election, but Trump has launched on these extensive efforts to litigate it in court and overturn the results. He calls people into the Oval Office to talk about it. And then he says something really extraordinary. And why don't you pick up from there, set the stage for us about what he says and why it is extraordinary. Sure. So one point I want to make is that this is a really important part of the book. In fact, it's how the first chapter starts out. And what he says is he's sitting there with a circle

of advisors. There's a Christmas tree behind him. He's got a Diet Coke at his hand. He's got Jared Kushner's out there, Eric Hirschman, Justin Clark, a lot of very key, very important figures are sitting in front of him in the Oval Office. He's got them surrounding him. He's at the Resolute desk. And what he says to them is, you know why we're doing this, right? And what he's referring to is this avalanche of litigation that he has launched over the outcome of the 2020 election, right? And it's a really important moment because during that conversation, Trump admits that his odds of overturning the results of the election through courtroom litigation is going to be very uphill. He recognized this in December of 2020, several weeks before January 6th. He knew that this was going to be

very hard for him to win this election. But what he says is that by doing this litigation and by keeping his supporters activated, he is setting the stage for if he were to want to run again. He knows that he was cheated out of it. But I think the main point is that this gets at a different type of motivation. Right. It wasn't about necessarily overturning this specific wrong of an erroneously accused faulty election, but it's about keeping him central to the Republican Party and also imbuing his base with the sense of grievance. Right. And it was an implicit acknowledgement that he was interested in running again. And some of the people in the room had never heard him say that before. So this was the first time for many of them that they had an indication that he was going to run in 2024. Correct.

Were they shocked by it? I mean, that seems to me very obvious that he would harbor these – actually, maybe it's not so obvious. At the time, there was question about it. Right. He had just lost. You're not supposed to lose as an incumbent. It's not a given that you'll run again before he is, plus he's fairly old.

So I guess there is something interesting about that. Right. And so to your point, it is imbuing within his supporters a sense of grievance, a sense that he was beaten down by a legal system that wanted him out of the White House by a broader, not just the Democratic Party, and not just the voters, but a deep state that was aligned against him. And so he set the stage really for what I just talked about, which was this sense that he identified with supporters who felt very much like, just like him, like they were being held back. Did he know at the moment that he would kind of paralyze the Republican Party in a way that you would either have to buy into this idea that the election had been stolen to him or you would be considered disloyal? Like there was no, like you said, it's all polarizing, right? And in that moment, he decided that that would be a polarizing

issue, whether or not you believe that the election had been stolen. He absolutely understood that it would be a polarizing issue. And the reason we know that is because at around this time, one of his pollsters, John McLaughlin, had started to commission polling looking at, well, this is actually after January 6th, but looking at support for Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney in their home states. And those are two who had voted for the impeachment and had not bought the big lie. Right. Correct.

So at that point, they understood that this was a definitional issue. And that before Trump even left the White House, he and his advisors were talking about how do we unseat these people, in other words. And so maybe he didn't totally understand it then, or maybe he did, not totally clear. But he certainly understood it after January 6th, that whether you were wherever you stood on January 6th was going to be a definitional issue for Republicans for months or years to come. There's always this idea that Trump launched his bid for the presidency because he wanted to stay out of jail, right? This is a theory. Well, he wanted to stay out of jail and he knew that

if he had to, if he's ever going to have a chance of evading these charges, he had to, you know, win the Oval Office. But I guess what your book kind of, what your book unearths is that, in fact, the calculation to run wasn't really about incarceration. It was about revenge. It was about more or less sticking it to the people who we thought took it from him. It was very much about revenge. And look, I mean, to some extent, maybe it was about incarceration, avoiding jail. I mean, it's one of those things that we simply don't have the answer to yet, right? When he clearly was thinking about running right away. For sure. But there are always these unanswered questions we have about Donald Trump, no matter

how much reporting is done on him. For example, and we're dealing with this right now, right, which is why does it feel like he sometimes aligned himself with Russia? Right. There's always been a lot of different discussions about this, 40 different possible explanations for it. But no one's really ever gotten to the bottom of it. And likewise, his decision to run again, there's a lot of different explanations for it, potentially, I think. And what this book argues is, and incarceration and avoiding incarceration may have been part of that. But what this book argues and it focuses on is his desire for revenge. And what you're seeing him do right now is try to exact revenge on his enemies,

probably even more than a lot of people expected when he was running, to be honest. Yeah, no, for sure. But it does raise the question and which is if you build so much of your second act in public life on this idea of victimhood and grievance and then you win right like can you perpetuate the politics of grievance going forward you have the power you now have your attorney general you have your FBI director, people who were fairly radical choices, all things considered, and very much loyalists. How much longer can you perpetuate which is that they're the ones who are responsible. You're no longer really campaigning. You're in charge now. And so if the stock market goes down, if there's inflation, if there's instability overseas, you're the one who's responsible for that. It's not the deep state anymore. Exactly. You are the deep state.

Yeah. I mean, this is almost always why, you know, this is a big part of the reason why presidents almost always lose seats in the midterms after they're elected, because they're responsible and they have a tough job and there's disappointments and bumps in the road and voters hold them accountable for that. One of the things that you are seeing that's quite interesting, though, and you saw this in the joint address to Congress, you're seeing Trump do it almost every single day is attack Joe Biden. He has not stopped attacking Joe Biden. He has not stopped blaming him for things, whether it's the price of eggs, whether any number of different issues, he's still blaming Joe Biden. And so to some extent, I think that can be seen. Well, you know, Biden, for what it's worth, Biden blamed him for a lot of stuff that he inherited, COVID, the economy. I mean, there are some, there's some truth to it, right? But in this case, when you've run so hard against this idea that nefarious forces are controlling all the situations around you and the deep state is responsible for all these bad things, and then you put your people in place and you rip the government out from underneath you because you want your loyalists in place.

At some point, you can't quite play victim again. That's, I think, when we'll see, you know, that's when we'll really see Trump's political dexterity is at that point. Final question for you, and probably the toughest one. You've been, how long have you been a reporter at this point? Since the end of 2007. So you've been around the block. Not as long as you. Missed me by a year. In all that time, who was the best

editor you ever worked for? It's got to be me. I've had a number of good editors. You're right. I might have suspected this question was coming. Yeah, you should have planned for it, buddy. Yeah, I should have planned for it.

It's all right. Don't worry about it. Hey, Alex, I want to say congrats on the book. It's awesome. I'm really proud of you. I think it's fantastic. I think people – Thank you.

Look, it's a rich canon of Trump literature out there, but this one really reveals some interesting stuff worthy of a purchase. I encourage people to go get it on Amazon. And I want to thank you for coming on and talking about it with us. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And thanks for your interest.