The Dispatch Podcast - Civil War in Trumpworld | Interview: Jonathan Karl

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Jonathan Karl saw the chaos, vengeance, and factional warfare bubbling within Donald Trump's political empire and reported it in his new book Tired of Winning, which is out today. Declan, who worked on research for the book, meets up with Jonathan to discuss the internecine drama, Bannon gossip, the dangers of 2024, and the process of reporting on Trump world. Show Notes: -Buy Tired of Winning on Amazon -Karl's Dispod interview on Trump's Final Days -Karl's Dispod interview on Front Row Seat -"I Am Your Retribution" speech -Trump as a wedding crasher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Declan Garvey, executive editor of the dispatch. And today I am talking to Jonathan Carl, Chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the author of a new book called Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. That's out today in bookstores everywhere. I should disclose. I am not a disinterested third party in this conversation. I've been working with John on Tired of Winning since October 2022. But, As a result, I'd like to think I have some pretty unique insight into his reporting process. And I hope this conversation helps bring listeners behind the scenes, as well as shed light on some of the true motivations driving Donald Trump's third presidential run. Carl, welcome to the dispatch podcast. Thanks so much for being here. Yeah, great to be here. So you've got this new book out that you can see here. Tuesday, November 14th, called Tired of Winning. And before we get too deep into the conversation, I should disclose that I am not impartial moderator here. I've been working with you on this project for what? It's more than a year at this point, right? Yeah, you came in at the inception. had a major impact on this book. So, so thank you for that. It's been, uh, it's been a pleasure. Um, but it's your, it's your third book about Donald Trump following front row at the Trump show in 2020, betrayal in 2021. This title, tired of winning, has a little bit of finality to it in, in some ways. Do you think is, is this your last Trump book? Or do you see this?

What's the, what's the word for a series with four? Tetrology. Yeah, I should disclose that when I wrote betrayal, the subtitle, uh, was the final act of the Trump show. Now, I've tried to explain. I, you know, I'm not, I'm not a political guy. So I spin is something I usually like to pierce, not to do myself. But, uh, I tried a little bit to say, you know, final act. Final act, you know, after the final act, you often have an encore or, uh, you know, some kind of a, some kind of an additional thing that happens afterwards. Um, I don't know. I mean, one of the big problems will be coming up with how to describe it, because trilogy does have a nice ring. I don't know if treason trilogy is the right way to describe this, but maybe.

We were talking the other day, Toy Story. They had one, two, and three, wrapped it up nicely in a bow, and then 10 years later, they went with the fourth one to bring a new generation in. So, you know, that could be the path down the road. And we won't be doing any prequel, so we're not going to be doing the Star Wars thing. Good, good. So because this is less a typical interview, I kind of want to bring listeners a little bit into the book writing process. So Tired of Winning was not the original title that you came up with when you first went to the publisher with the proposal. So can you talk a little bit about

the original conception of the book and kind of how that conception changed over the course of reporting it out. Yeah, it's amazing how things changed. As you and I started working on this, you came in very, very early in this process. And my idea was to write a book about the sad and lonely demise of a disgraced former president as he faded away into obscurity. I'm only slightly exaggerating that, but that was the feel. He had left the White House as a disgraced president, his second impeachment trial. You actually had seven members of his own party voting to convict him. He was a pariah. You know, Fox News had basically forgotten who he was. You know, you didn't see him. He was no longer doing interviews on Hannity or, you know, Fox and Friends.

They had kind of clearly moved on. He was certainly discussed elsewhere, but it was mostly the impeachment trial or then a look ahead to the January 6th hearings. But there was really no sense that this was somebody who would make a political comeback. And the original, I mean, kind of a working title I had worked with. I don't know if it was, if it would ever have truly made it into final form was the biggest loser, you know, a playoff his reality TV, you know, DNA. And the idea is, you know, how could you call him the biggest loser? He, you know, he beat Hillary Clinton. He won a race. You know, maybe the, as I have said, the biggest ups. set in the history of American politics in 2016. He presided over four years, all three years before

we get to the pandemic of peace and prosperity, low unemployment, low inflation, relative peace around the world. How could you call this guy the biggest loser? But the idea was to be the biggest loser, you have to have a hell of a lot to lose. But as I was working on the book, something strange happened. He reasserted his dominance over the Republican Party. Yes, he did. And it really started to kind of happen around these indictments that we'll touch on a little bit later in this interview. And we kind of have some very interesting reporting on in the book.

Your first two books were obviously about Trump's presidency, his time at the White House. this one touches on a little bit of the end some of the things that were going on post-election before before he left office but it's primarily about what he's been up to since at Mara Lago at Bedminster how did that affect kind of your reporting process obviously you couldn't go and find everybody in Trump world at the White House every day or at the Trump hotel down the street. They've kind of scattered across the country. And Trump himself is not as accessible to get interviews or to talk to. So kind of how did your reporting process of this book differ from the other two? Well, first, I should say, I think that the three books, and I have no

idea if I'll actually have the desire to do a fourth. God help me. But the three books are in dialogue, each other. I think that this one builds on things that I wrote about and reported on and discussed in books one and two. In fact, as you know, in one of the real pivotal chapters in the book about the launch of the campaign and the and the theme of retribution that became the animating focus of the campaign, I talk about a book that I wrote. A book that I wrote, almost 30 years ago when I was a young reporter for the New York Post called America's called The Right to Bear Arms, The Rise of America's New Militias, which was about the militia movement in America that came out of Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing.

And just interject there real quick. Trump makes a cameo in that book as well. Yeah, there are so when I wrote the first book, Trump was still in the White House. I was a White House reporter for ABC. And my goal was not to write a polemic about how dreadful Trump is or anything. I mean, it wasn't any, I was not, that was not the purpose at all. I wanted to, the way I remember describing it at the time is I want to write a book that

somebody could pick up 50 years from now to answer the question, what was it like? You know, what was it like to be at the Trump White House, to be at the White House with Donald Trump as the president? And then betrayal obviously has more of a focus and, you know, and is a much more critical look and gets at Donald Trump's responsibility for what happened on January 6th and not just January 6th, but the entire effort to overturn a presidential election. This one, you know, again, builds on both. I wanted to really, this is not strictly polemic. This is an effort to try to describe this amazing moment in American history and this incredibly improbable story of a president going from defeat and disgrace to mounting a political comeback. back. He was not cooperative himself. He didn't want to talk to me for this one. I interviewed twice for betrayal. But what I found is I could talk to almost everybody around him. Some of those

interviews on the record, some of them not. One of the characters that makes, there's recurrent appearances throughout this book is Steve Bannon, who I think is one of the most important figures in in Trump world. I think there's nobody that truly gets at what nobody does more to give Trump some kind of a vision for what he's trying to accomplish than Steve Bannon. For Trump, it's all about I'm Trump and I'm the greatest and I never lose. With Bannon, there's that message, that darker side. And I had hours and hours and hours of conversations with him. And, you know, much of it on the record and very revealing and very candid. But it's not just him. I spoke to people who, you know, in Mar-a-Lago, I spoke to people in

his political universe. All of the people that I dealt with in the White House were gone. I mean, one of the opening scenes in this book is I went down to Mar-a-Lago in November of 2022. It was November 15th. It was the day he announced he was. running for president for a third time. And the scene is really, I mean, it's an incredible scene because there's nobody there that helped him win the White House the first or second time. None of the campaign managers are there. None of the significant figures from the campaign of there.

There's no Kelly Ann Conway. There's no Brad Parskow. There's no Steve Bannon. There's not even, you know, Steve Miller. I mean, family members. I mean, Jared showed up. but it was very clear he was not going to be part of the campaign. He was there, I guess, you know, to show that somebody bothered to show up. But Ivanka put out a statement explaining

why not only was she not there for the announcement, but that she would have nothing to do with his campaign. You know, Don Jr. had some travel problems, even though he had been there two days earlier. They did not show up. And then there wasn't a single confirmed member of his cabinet that was there. None of his former press secretaries were there. And he had four of them known as former chiefs of staff and he had four of them bothered to show up. You know, you had, you know, some of the kind of the kind of de-list figures from Trump world people like Sebastian Gorka, you know, who barely lasted a few months in the Trump White House and nobody can really quite figure out what he did while he was there. You know, you had Roger Stone show

up best known for getting both a conviction and a pardon. But, you know, none of the, none of the the key figures from either the Trump presidency or the Trump campaigns bothered to show up again because it had a feeling like it was, you know, there was the stench of a loser around him and people didn't want to be a part of it again. That's right. I mean, coming on the heels of last year's midterms when obviously all the Trump aligned candidates dramatically underperformed, I should say, most, not every single one, but really, really. really cost the Republican Party. Their red tsunami, their red wave and their chance to control the Senate, DeSantis

at that point was really kind of coming into his own. He won a huge re-election victory in Florida. And it seemed like at that point that there was a changing of the guard of some kind. And part of the reason why he was, Trump was announcing his campaign when he was, was to try and steal some of that momentum back. I mean, in fact, because DeSantis had just won that huge re-election victory in Florida, and there was a poll. So the announcement was November 15th, 2022.

I just looked back at this recently. There was a poll, the Wall Street Journal poll, in the middle of December. So about a month later, and it showed Trump at 36 or 38 percent, DeSantis over 50. I mean, DeSantis, and again, he hadn't announced he was running yet, DeSantis hadn't. But, I mean, it looked like Trump could lose to his, you know, former little minion, you know, DeSantis. So it looked pretty grim. And I'm sure, I mean, we'll get at, I think there's a reason it turned around. I think there are several reasons, but there's a couple of very big ones why it turned around.

But you were asking me about the process. And one thing I should say, because I don't know that people really quite get this. because Trump can be absolutely vicious in his attacks on journalists. And he's been very vicious in his attacks on me personally. I've known him since 1994. And for many, many years, I had a very good relationship with Trump, including in the Trump White House. They would complain about my reporting, but Trump would always refer to me as somebody who, you know,

used to treat him really fair. Be nice, John, be nice. He used to be a fair reporter. But it was kind of in, it was somewhat good natured as good natured as he could be talking about the enemy of the people. But I say, I've never had a hard time getting some of those people that you will see the most, you know, vilifying the press, vilifying me to sit down and talk to me and talk to me quite candidly about what's actually going on. I mean, it's, it's an astounding thing. And part of it is because there are so many warring factions within Trump world, even now, but especially during the White House era, that people want to talk to you so they can basically dish on the other people that are close to Trump. Yeah. I do want to ask you about that. I heard a lot of these conversations between you and Steve Bannon.

You were very generous in sharing those. But, you know, it's not quite Tuesdays with more. but you know it's like uh just as revealing just as uh just as enlightening but you know it he doesn't seem like he's talking to you begrudgingly he doesn't seem like you know he's at times even excited to to be on the phone with you and to fill you in on what's been happening either at mara lago or or on the hill or what have you what is his uh what do you think is his rationale for being so open throughout this entire process it we kind of because we've been reporting this over a year, you kind of can see, he wasn't thrilled with

Trump in the direction of the campaign in the fall of 2022. And that's kind of adjusted over the course of the year. But why was he kind of trying to coach Trump through the media or get his bigger message out there? Why do you think that he was so willing to talk to you? You remember there was a, and I don't have the quote in front of me, but shortly after that announcement speech, Bannon was really down on Trump. And he told me about it. And, you know, because that speech, that announcement speech really said nothing. I mean, Jason Miller, Trump's one of his spokesman, advisors, was very proud that he got Trump to not dwell on the 2020 election because, of course, it was all the talk of, you know, the 2020 election and stop the steal and all that

that it had been, uh, the view, the widely held viewed, I think the correct view hurt Republicans in the 2022 midterm. So this announcement was a week later. And, you know, Jason and others convinced Trump, don't get out there and talk about 2020. You know, it's not good. So he didn't. So it was teleprompter Trump for the most part. And, you know, he talked through a litany of warmed over policy proposals that he doesn't really give a crap about. Um, he, you know, told a few old stories from the White House and he announced he was running for president. And one of the things he said is, we're going to drain the swamp. And Bannon, I remember telling me just days later, don't give me drain the swamp.

You had a chance to drain the swamp. You filled the swamp. This is Bannon talking to me. So why does he do it? I mean, I don't, the honest answers, I don't know for sure. I think that I think that Bannon sees himself as you know as something of an historic figure who helped usher this massive change and it's a revolutionary change and it's upended one of our major parties and that it has the Republican Party and you know he thinks that you know and I

think rightly so that he's the one that's given as insofar as there is an ideology behind behind this movement, it comes from Bannon. And he wants to make sure that comes through crystal clear. And it's not just about Trump and his ego, that there's a larger world historic agenda going on here. That's kind of Bannon's view of the world. And of course, Bannon's at the middle of that. I remember early in Trump's presidency that got Bannon into some trouble

when he was on the cover of Time magazine and there was an S&L skit about how he's the one really running the show and Trump was at some toy president's desk. Yep. And they kind of had a falling out. A huge falling out. It was brutal. Sloppy Steve.

I know. But it seems like they're back together again. He was at Mara Lago for extended periods of time earlier this year. You talk about all the people who weren't at his Trump's launch in November of 2022. I think were he doing it again today, he might have a bigger crowd because people see the writing on the wall here a little bit, but it's not going to be the A team of staffing his administration. If he is the nominee and wins the general election next year, it's probably not going to be

the B team or the C team. So who is he surrounding himself with right now? What does his kitchen cabinet look like? and kind of what would you expect to see different in a Trump administration 2.0? I mean, you spend so much time now with his lawyers. And, you know, Todd Blanche, who's kind of the lead lawyer, is somebody who had no prior, you know, ties to Trump whatsoever. He, you know, he's a former prosecutor, federal prosecutor.

He's a pretty good lawyer. I mean, he's a good lawyer. And look, you know, good defense counsel is important. And Trump, there's a great footnote in book, which I think you kind of helped help me pull together, which is, you know, a list just off the top of our heads of all the lawyers who have worked for Trump since he came to the White House, not the government lawyers, not people like Pat Cipollone or Ty Cobb, but like the outside lawyers.

And it takes up like a quarter of a page in the book. It's just this list in very small print as a footnote of the names. And, you know, Blanche is one of the, is one of the serious people that's on the legal team. But he's, you know, he just by necessity, the political strategy and the legal strategy, and again, we can get to this later. But Trump is not particularly strategic about anything. But insofar as there's a strategy, they've merged together. And he is spending more time with his legal team. And, you know, Boris Epstein is a very key figure.

another person who only lasted in the Trump White House for a matter of months and was not taken particularly seriously by the people staffed that West Wing. I mean, now he is, you know, right there by Trump's side. And he's not, he's not arguing in court for Trump. He's not really Trump's lawyer, but he, and he's a lawyer. He went to Georgetown. But Boris is basically, you know, tries to, you know, bring together all the legal, everything legal for Trump and in a way that really annoys some of the lawyers. Blanche is kind of interesting Todd Blanche because Todd Blanche also represents Boris because Boris has his own issues, of course.

So it's highly complicated. He has a pretty, he's got a smaller political staff than he had in, certainly in 2020 when it was a really big political team. But even even as the race got underway in 2016, you know, Susie Wiles is the most important figure. She was, you know, involved in 2020. She's, you know, she's a, she's a real political operative. Chris LaSavita, who is somebody that I've known since even before he, his claim to fame had been swift boat veterans for truth. If you remember, I think you were maybe nine years old. years old. I'm sure you were following this intimately, you know, which managed to portray

a Silver Star winner John Kerry, Vietnam veteran as a coward and maybe a traitor. And, you know, I mean, it was quite a, it was quite an amazing feat. But he's kind of always been a master of the dark arts. But he's, again, somebody who had no ties to Trump before he was brought into this campaign. But he's a pretty shrewd operator. So he has some serious political people who I think maybe have more freedom than the political people did in 2016 or 2020, largely because Trump is so tied up in illegal cases. I want to put on my hard-hitting journalism hat for a second. And there are some anecdotes or stories about those legal teams, kind of the squabbles within them. And, you know, I think one that was published in the Atlantic last week about

Trump yelling at one of his lawyers. I think Todd Blanche, who you just mentioned, about how he's going to lose him the case or whatever. There's a little. But yes. You know, there are a lot of these stories that are very personal, very private, and you were able to report them out, get access to them. But, you know, as you mentioned earlier, Trump and some of his people iced you out, you're not necessarily able to bring it to them, say, hey, I heard this. Did this really happen? Is this true? What is your process for deciding when a source talks to you and gives you a story about Trump or something that he did or said or believes? How do you decide what's true and what's false? It can be very tricky, especially, you know, because the traditional

methods often don't work. I mean, not for this book, but there was a story that we had done for ABC a while back where we went to the Trump team. It was a good, you know, it was a pretty significant exclusive report. We went to them for, you know, to get reaction and check a few things. And they responded by responding before the story was posted, which is a breach. You know, I mean, it's so you can't always, you don't have to be careful how much you can, you can trust them. In writing betrayal, uh, I had two interviews with Trump that were, one was quite lengthy at Mar-a-Lago. Another one was, was fairly lengthy. It was over the phone. And it was right before the book went to press where I went through, you know, like the dozen or so, you know,

most explosive things and there were a lot of explosive details in betrayal to get Trump's response and I couldn't do that this time because he refused to talk to me and for a while his people weren't you know his official kind of spokespeople were not responsive either I think they're a little more responsive now because they know that being non-responsive doesn't really help them either but you know it's it's the same it's journalism you just have to kind of know what your sources, who your sources are, try to get a sense for who you can test, can trust, and to do everything you can to verify. And there were things that I chased down very aggressively that I believe were likely to be

true that I did not put in this book because I couldn't get them over. You know, my level of comfort is am I really satisfied that this is solid? There are some pretty great details that maybe one day you'll be able to confirm them and get them back. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months.

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use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You know, with a lot of these political books. I think you've gotten plenty of it. Maggie Haberman at the New York Times has gotten plenty of Bob Woodward. The criticism of you're saving this for the book. You're not reporting it out in real time when, you know, we can, there's the power to do something about it. Can you, I think that's a pretty unfair criticism. Can you explain? It's the dumbest. It's one of the dumbest things that I've ever heard said about my work. Oh, how dare you? You held this for your book. You're just trying to

cash in. Why didn't you tell us? I mean, you know, writing a book is a different process than doing a story, you know, for the dispatch or doing something on ABC News or writing an article for whatever. I mean, writing a book is an in-depth process. You talk to people. You, in some cases, you get people who are willing to have really in-depth conversations with you because you are writing a book. Motivations can vary, but often the motivation.

is to get the historic record straight and people that don't want to be engaged in the, you know, the back and forth of the daily news cycle, but do want to have for history a sense of what really happened. So, you know, when people say that, it's like, no, I didn't hold it for the book. I got the information because I wrote the book. I mean, it's just entirely. Now, there are some, I think the reason why this generally very stupid, criticism, sorry to be blunt, is out there, is there have been some issues which had a, you know, kind of a little bit of a point. One was Bob Woodward when Woodward revealed that Trump had told him, you know, that the coronavirus, this stuff is, is deadly. It's, you know,

far worse than the flu. You know, this is this is really, really, really bad. And then Trump would go out and tell the world it's just like the flu and it's no big deal. But meanwhile, Bob Woodward was having conversations for his book to be published much later, where Trump was confiding in him and saying something entirely different. Now, Woodward did eventually release those audio clips, as I recall, even in advance of his book and before the presidential election, because he thought this was information that people should have. So, you know, again, whatever. I mean, it's, and then I had a, I had a circumstance as I was writing betrayal where I had worked very hard to convince Bill Barr to talk to me. It took me a couple of months of like browbeating, you know,

of him to talk to me. He finally agreed to give me an interview and it was on background. And then I went back and I was like, you know, what you are saying is incredibly meaningful, but it's only meaningful if your name is attached to it. This was the interview that he gave where he first, you know, beyond what he said in December of 2020, he really went chapter and verse into how there, not only was there no major fraud in the 2020 election, but he had investigated all of these major allegations that had come from Trump. And he went on the record and told me the whole story. And that was for a betrayal. That was for a book. But the book wasn't coming out maybe for another six months. And I decided I wanted to get out immediately. So I wrote an article for

the Atlantic, and I put it out basically what would become that chapter in betrayal. But look, I mean, writing a, and also I love to cash in by writing a book. I mean, I don't know how much people know about the publishing world. I mean, if you get a huge bestseller, yes, you can make money in publishing. But, I mean, that's not the motivation. I mean, I wrote these books because I wanted to do something that would stand the test of time and get beyond the crazy, ridiculously rapid news cycle, or we forget, you know, the massively insane thing that happened five minutes ago because something even more insane happened, you know, five minutes hence. So I think these, these, as I said before, these are the most, this is the most important work

I have done. And information that I got that really broke ground and betrayal. And in this book happened because I took the time and somehow convinced you to come in and work with me on this as well and did some, you know, in-depth reporting and research that I hope ultimately will stand the test of time. I do think that that's something that I hope people get as they're reading this book. And again, not an impartial observer. But I do think, you know, there, I think your first two books probably had, and we've talked about this, had more newsy nuggets and kind of fun stories, anecdotes. But I think it's really important to get this story out there, frame it in the way that we did and kind of capture what these last

two or three years of Trump's post-presidency have been like. And I think kind of turning back more to the substance of the book, that one of the overarching themes and, you know, something that we really tried to get across is that Donald Trump today is not the same Donald Trump that most people probably remember from 2020 or early 2021. You know, Oh, he's been in hibernation almost for a couple of years now. You know, he's doing events, but you almost have to seek it out rather than have it kind of come to you or forced on you like it was for five or six years there. So when people start to tune back in, the media starts to tune back in as the race heats up, what do you think is going to surprise people the most about Trump today versus Trump in 2020? I think that he's become divorced from reality.

This is, that was always there to a degree. I mean, you were almost paraphrasing Ron DeSantis there at the last debate when he said he's not the same guy. I ran in 2016. But there's some real truth to it. I mean, one of the things that I found truly shocking. And, you know, the kind of cliche about Trump was a lot of shocking. Not much is surprising. but this actually surprised me

was the degree to which he bought into one of the craziest of all the conspiracy theories that this idea and it was really something that started with Q&N that Trump would be reinstated as president that there was this whole that the dominoes were all going to come down

and the Supreme Court was suddenly going to jump in say, you know what, that 2020 election, you know, it was no good. Biden, get out of the White House. Donald, please get back in there as quickly as you can. I mean, it's insane. Mike Lindell was saying this stuff publicly doing it. I think one of the first places he did it was on Steve Bannon's podcast. And even Bannon was like, oh, no, no, what are we doing? But what I discovered is that he is that Trump was obsessed with it and was talking with everybody about it. And I went back to the interview that I did with him in July of 2021 when I was wrapping up the last book. And right before I did that interview, he'd issued a press release

that ended with the lines 24 or before. And, you know, people didn't really pay him much attention. That's weird. He doesn't really think, oh, nah, I couldn't. So I asked him about it only because he was sounding like he was, he's like, you're not going to believe the stuff that's coming out. That's where the interview starts before I get my first question. You're not going to believe the stuff that's coming out about, you're going to see, you're going to see, you won't report it, but you're going to see, you know, in Arizona, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and you're going to see all the stuff that's coming out. And, but he was truly trying to encourage this movement to try to upend a presidential election.

and evicts a guy that had been in the White House. I mean, this went on until early 2022. It's, and I don't think people are aware that, I mean, how could a guy, like, think that? Right. You would know if, like me, for your job, you had to read truth social every day for six or eight months that my wife has noted that my mood. By the way, by the way, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you've, been permanently damaged by that experience. It's tough to come back from.

But I mean, it truly, like, the shock factor is gone. He says some of the most outlandish things that if he had tweeted them in 2017 would be the main story. Well, that's the thing, right? Because he was off Twitter and he was off Fox News and he had no, he couldn't walk into the White House briefing room and have the cameras all around him. nobody was actually paying attention to him. You know, he was in the news, but again, it was because of the investigations.

Right. But you didn't really have a window into what Donald Trump was actually thinking and saying and believing. Right. And he, that's, that helped fuel his comeback. People didn't get that look that you and I had, you know, deep into the soul of what this guy was up to. And, you know, there's a couple things in the book where we talk about, you know, he's down in Mar-a-Lago. Weddings are happening. Members are having weddings or different events.

And Trump shows up to, you know, greet the bride and groom or whatever. And he starts speaking. And some of the little clips come out because people shoot it on their iPhone. And for a while, that was maybe the best insight into what he was thinking and doing. I mean, there's some crazy stuff out there in YouTube land. But again, not many people were actually seeing that stuff. Right. These, I encourage anybody listening to this to go seek out those clips.

It's like a wedding band or a wedding DJ. And there are probably three or four of these. It's not an isolated incident. He's doing this weekend in, weekend out. And it's just a bassist and a singer just standing there waiting and waiting and waiting for him to stop talking about the domino theory of once. Arizona's audit comes in the way that it's expected to, then surely Michigan's state legislature will decide. And Vermont's doing stuff.

Vermont? Like Vermont? What? I mean, some of it's just, it's not, it's not even, it's completely divorced from any sense of reality. Yes. I mean, he's, he's down there. This is the former president in the United States.

He could be, uh, you know, whatever Obama's been doing, uh, Spotify contracts and, uh, and Netflix documentary series and going to all these events. in Maralago, watching OAN broadcast the live stream closed circuit television of the Cyber Ninjas audit. And he's, he goes to Arizona later in the year to give a speech, I think, at a Turning Point USA conference. And he's shouting out individual state house members of Arizona, who he recognizes from TV. And he says, I've seen you all summer, things like that. He knows these people. that's what he's spending his time doing

and so it'll be interesting to see as he kind of gets thrust back into the limelight here is he able to pivot or is the stump speech and his you know the legal case is going to be what consume him I mean if you look at what he's done just over the past month and a half

he has been in court more days than he has done political rallies so since October 2nd, my count is he spent eight, might be nine days now, actually, eight or nine days in court. This is just on the New York Attorney General civil case against his company, and he wasn't required to be in court except for one of those days, which is when he testified. So, you know, he's still not, like, out there in the way you would get a, you know, a political

candidate. I mean, the number of rallies are really few and far between, and the number of actual interviews are actually few and far between. So we're not, I mean, that's one reason why I feel that this book is by far the most important thing I have done, even more most important of the three, is because I think that it is essential as we get into this election year that people actually see who Donald Trump is right now. He's the most ubiquitous guy on the planet. But I think that as you, I think the poll numbers you see and especially these hypothetical general election matchup, which doesn't seem so hypothetical anymore, you know, Biden versus Trump. It's like people have this notion of, oh, yeah, you know, well, he was president and again, inflation was down and then the Middle East wasn't in flames and that's all fine. It's like, okay, fine, but before you go and vote, look at, look at, look at. what he actually stands for now.

This is the focus of the first chapter of the book that was published by the Atlantic earlier this month. And I think this is one of my favorite details in the entire thing. It's about a speech that Trump gave at CPAC back in the spring. I was there. I think you might have left by then, lucky you.

I was still sticking around. And it's a very weird dichotomy where if you read the transcript of the speech that he gave, it's one of the darkest and most cynical and really sinister sounding things that you've ever seen in American politics. The way he delivered it in the room, it didn't come off that way. It was lighthearted. It was, you know, jokes interspersed here and there. but if you actually look at the words that he's saying and you know you talk to Steve Bannon about this after the fact and he kept using this one phrase to describe this speech over and over and over again come retribution and the I just listening to it I found

that so odd Googled the phrase find out that it's from these civil war historians published a book in the 1980s basically making the case that there was a place that there was a lot by the confederacy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln and kidnap and or assassinate you know what however things play out and the code word for that operation was come retribution and and banon you brought it back to ban and he's like oh yeah that's great book have you read the book it's a great book um so is is that the animating focus of trump 2024 is it retribution and revenge that was the rebirth of the trump campaign so that's in the spring um and you had the you had the aborted launch in november you had desantis um beating him in in several polls not just that

wall street journal poll i mentioned from december there there are polls in early uh 2023 would show a desantis in the lead um you know trump's campaign is, you know, he's doing things like selling NFTs. Of course, earlier than that, he's dining with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. He's, it doesn't look at all like a serious campaign. It certainly doesn't look like a campaign that has a message. But he found the message as the indictments came down the pipe. Now, that CPAC was before the first indictment, but it was when it was clear.

The special counsel had been appointed. It was clear Jack Smith was doing really. serious stuff. He wasn't going to just do it to say, never mind. There was a real sense that he was facing impending legal peril. And Trump's focus became, and I think Bannon was a big part of encouraging this, that the memorable line was, you know, in 2016, I said, I am your voice. and then he looks to this election, he says, I am your retribution. And the whole focus is,

I am going to get retribution on the people who have wronged you by wronging me. You know, they're coming after me because their real target is you and I stand in the way. And he really talks about, in very graphic terms, rooting out all the embedded enemies within the U.S. government,

that's so-called deep state, you know, rooting them out, destroying them, annihilating them. And Bannon, you know, called it the come retribution speech. I think it was the beginning of a turn. And by the way, when the Atlantic article ran and Bannon, you know, was facing some blowback because, you know, why are you talking about, you know, about Donald Trump and invoking the confederacy and not just invoking the Confederacy, but invoking the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln? So Bannon sent me a note just as soon as the article popped and he hadn't even seen the whole thing yet. He said, I hope you included the predicate.

And he put predicate in all caps. And the predicate Bannon explained to me was that Abraham Lincoln had ordered the assassination of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, and his whole cabinet. So comretribution, the plot to get Lincoln was about, you know, retribution for that. I was like, okay, well, we could get out. I don't really get a whole deep dive, but thank you for completely and totally confirming that you were, in fact, invoking the Confederacy and talking about Donald Trump. But then that's kind of step one.

the next major event in the in the in the trump campaign was his first actual campaign rally of of the 2024 campaign and of course he chose to do it in waco texas and this is another case very important early primary state yes i mean i mean if you want to win in iowa and new hampshire and you want to get a good run up on on nevada and south carolina you have to really reach out to people in Texas and specifically Waco, Texas. No, it's absurd. I mean, there's no reason to be there. And except for the tremendous symbolic value of the fact that that was where you truly saw federal overreach by the, you know, what would now be called the deep state, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI, Federal Marshals, and their efforts,

to arrest David Koresh and his followers in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, a siege that ended up a total disaster with more than 50 people killed in an inferno and became a rallying cry for people who didn't trust the U.S. government who feel that, you know, plenty of reasons not trust the U.S. government, but people thought that the U.S. government's out to get us. And this led to the militia movement, this inspired Timothy McVeigh, who You know, two years later goes and bombs the Oklahoma City federal building. All of that. So when I went to ban and I was like, Waco, are you kidding me?

What are you? Branch Devidians? He's like, yeah, we're the Trump Divideons. It's explicit. It was meant to show and remembered the context there. Trump gave that first rally not long after the FBI executed the search warrant at Mar-Lago. And as we quote in the book, one of the one of the actual Branch Divideans who was still alive because he wasn't there for the siege, but but was a member back then said, yeah, it's just like, you know, what they did to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, you know, it's just like what he did to the Branch Davidians. So, I mean, it's, it's really, it's really dark and really sinister stuff.

And I remember sitting down and I think you heard this interview too with with Bannon. at one point and you know there there were there were incidents that made you really feel like things could turn violent pretty quickly um there was there was the there was the incident in ohio uh where um you know a crazed gunman attacked an FBI field office um and i asked bannon aren't you afraid of violence that this could all turn violent and his answer to me was no, because we're going to win. That's, that's ominous. It's, it's difficult, we're sitting here recording this on Thursday.

The book comes out on Tuesday. The Republican junior card debate was last night. And it's, it's jarring, you know, having gone through this process of working on this book to see those five candidates on. the stage talking about should we frack in the Everglades or only 20 miles outside the Everglades? Or should we combine Israel aid with Ukraine aid or should there be separate bills? Right. I mean, all of this stuff seems they're important issues. They're incredibly important issues. But against the backdrop of what we're talking about right now and that person

is quadrupling all of them in the polls, it just seems, you know, a little bit quaint, uh, to, to be covering that stuff in, in a more traditional way. You and I had kind of an ongoing debate as we were going through, uh, you know, doing the, the research and reporting on, on the book. Um, I, I, I was pretty explicit that I, I did not think that he would be the Republican nominee again, even as he gained strength and started to trounce all his rivals. I still, I worded a little differently now. I think I say I, I, I still think that he, I still think he can be beaten. I mean, he's obviously the prohibitive frontrunner. It's hard to imagine any of those people on that little stage, you know, suddenly surging in the polls.

But I think it's, I think it's still possible for the reasons we've discussed. I don't think that the polls reflect a deep understanding of, of that dark, ominous message that he has now. and also more generally the kind of weirdness and divorce in the way he's divorced from reality. But, I mean, that was like a twilight zone debate in another dimension where Donald Trump almost didn't exist. I mean, the first question was about Trump. And even in the answer to the first question, there wasn't much engagement. And then they were off into not only the issues you mentioned, but also kind of petty attacks on one another, you know, whether or not Nikki Haley wanted Chinese business, whether, you know, what, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's,

to come to South Carolina when she was governor and whatever lobbying, or whatever, you know, I mean, look, it was like kind of petty, you know, cheap oppo research stuff and almost no mention of the guy that has a 30 to 40 point lead over all of them. But, you know, he, he is incredibly volatile, as I think. think comes through in this book more so he's always been a mercurial and you know i mean that that lord knows i covered four years of that white house i know what it was like um but uh you know there were restraining influences on him often that didn't work very well at restraining him but there were people around him who um would would try to pen him in and try to undermine him we talk about this in in the book of it um those people are gone they are gone they are not there anymore and as we actually get into a campaign let's see where this let's see where this goes that is uh i think a good place to to leave it it's uh there's a whole lot

more where that came from in the book so jonathan thank you so much for uh joining us on the dispatch podcast today and thank you for uh for bringing me along on on the journey the past year it's been enlightening it was fascinating enlightening if not always uplifting uh thank you that one Thank you. Thank you.