“I’m just not going to leave,” Trump told aides, according to Herberman.
“We will never part,” Trump said to another. “If you won the election, how can you walk away?”
Haberman’s book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, is out October 4th.
The revelations from the book come as US House and Justice Department investigators investigate Trump’s refusal to hand over power after the 2020 election. The House Select Committee that conducted the investigation is due to have further hearings and a final report this fall, and federal investigators recently served subpoenas to several former Trump aides.
Haberman, a CNN political analyst, has covered Trump in The New York Times since the 2016 presidential election. Her story has made her a frequent target of Trump’s slander on Twitter.
Haberman wrote that shortly after the November 3 election, Trump seemed to realize that he had lost to Biden. He asked his advisor to tell him what went wrong. “We did our best,” he said, comforting one of his advisers. “We thought we got it,” Trump told reporters junior to him, Haberman said.
At one point, however, Trump’s mood changed and he abruptly told his aide he had no intention of leaving the White House for Biden to move in in late January 2021.
He overheard Ronna McDaniel, chairman of the Republican National Committee, ask, “If they stole it from me, why should I leave?”
Trump’s pledge to refuse to leave the White House had no historical precedent, and his declaration made aides uneasy about what he might do next, Haberman writes. The closest similarity may have been to Mary Todd Lincoln, who stayed in the White House for nearly a month after her husband, President Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated, the authors noted.
Haberman, a longtime New York-based reporter who has worked for both New York tabloids, said Trump’s post-election period was a reminder of his attempts to emerge from the dire financial woes of 30 years ago. I wrote that I set it. All options are open as long as he can.
But Trump couldn’t decide which way to go after his 2020 loss. Haberman brought out Diet Coke when Trump pushed the red button on the Oval Office desk. He wrote that he asked almost everyone, including his followers, which option would lead to success.
A report provided to CNN from the upcoming book also reveals new details about what those around Trump were doing in the aftermath of the election loss that Trump refused to accept. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was reluctant to confront Trump about losing the war, he said.
When he encouraged a group of aides to go to the White House and brief the then president, Kushner was asked why he didn’t join them himself. Haberman writes that it was likened to the floor scene in
“The priest will come later,” said Kushner.
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