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Books‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell us Books show how close the US came to disaster, and document an unprecedented moment in US history that is not yet over
I Alone Can Fix It: Trump as wannabe Führer
Martin Pengelly in Washington@ More
BooksI Alone Can Fix It review: Donald Trump as wannabe Führer – in another riveting read Gen Mark Milley saw that the US was in a ‘Reichstag moment’ – four days before the Capitol riot. With this and much more startling reporting, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post deliver the goods once againLloyd GreenFri 16 Jul 2021 07.37 EDTLast modified on Fri 16 Jul 2021 08.24 EDTCocooned at his resorts, the Trump Organization indicted, Donald Trump has come to embrace the insurrection.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead more“Personally, what I wanted is what they wanted,” he tells Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker of the Washington Post.Five people died after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on 6 January, seeking to overturn the election.Last week, Trump declared: “These were peaceful people, these were great people.”So much for blaming Antifa. Think Charlottesville redux, on a larger stage. Or something even more ominous.In their second book on the Trump presidency, Leonnig and Rucker report that on 2 January 2021, two months after election day and as Trump still refused to concede defeat, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told aides: “This is a Reichstag moment.”He was referring to the fire at the German parliament on 27 February 1933, an incident seized as a pretext by Hitler to begin arresting opponents and to consolidate his power.“The gospel of the Führer,” the authors quote Milley as saying.According to the general, the US under Trump was experiencing its own version of the late Weimar Republic, complete with modern-day “Brownshirts”. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Milley was not alone in seeing shadows of the past slither into the daylight.Trump, Leonnig and Rucker quote a senior official as saying, is a “guy who takes fuel, throws it on the fire, and makes you scared shitless”, then says “‘I will protect you.’“That’s what Hitler did to consolidate power in 1933.”This is a blockbuster follow-up to A Very Stable Genius, in which Leonnig and Rucker chronicled the chaos of Trump’s first three years in office. I Alone Can Fix It pulls back the curtain on the handling of Covid-19, the re-election bid and its chaotic and violent aftermath.The pair are Pulitzer winners, for investigative reporting. Their book is essential reading. They have receipts, which they lay out for all to see.Of Covid, they capture Marc Short, Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, telling folks in February 2020: “It’s not that bad.” The families of more than 600,000 dead Americans would probably disagree. (Short later contracted the virus.)Feeling burned by the authors’ first book, this time Trump sat for a two-and-a-half-hour interview. At the end of it, he let it be known – with a “twinkle in his eye” – that “for some sick reason” he “enjoyed it”.Much as he claims to hate the media and the elite, Trump craves their attention. Much as he believes in his own power of persuasion, Leonnig and Rucker were not converted.Trump’s hubris shines through. But for the pandemic, he claims re-election was inevitable. It’s a salesman’s pitch but one sufficiently rooted in reality. He also claims America’s two greatest presidents could not have defeated him. That is just surreal:
I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”
Before Covid, the economy was humming. Trump had taken down Qassem Suleimani, a top general in Iran’s Quds force, and the public approved.Joe Biden lost nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. His first win was on 29 February, days after the stock market’s Covid-induced crash, assisted by James Clyburn of South Carolina, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus and House majority whip.On the relationship between Covid and Trump’s defeat, Leonnig and Rucker describe Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s now former prime minister, sharing his thoughts with Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who worked for him and Trump, in early 2020.Netanyahu said: “The only thing that can beat President Trump is coronavirus.”With analytic capacity Trump could never muster and a sense of history he lacked, Netanyahu added: “If you don’t understand what a pandemic is and the mathematics behind how this will spread if we don’t contain it, it will collapse economies, and that changes the ball game tremendously.”In August, Trump reamed out Fabrizio after he warned the president the electorate was “really fatigued”. Trump bellowed: “They’re tired? They’re fatigued? They’re fucking fatigued? Well, I’m fucking fatigued, too.”The book’s rawest revelations concern 6 January. At best, Trump was blasé about Mike Pence’s plight, presiding over confirmation of Biden’s win, stuck inside the Capitol as halls and offices were plundered. Like Nero watching Rome burn, Trump fiddled in front of his TV.As for the rioters, Trump now claims he and they are one: “They showed up just to show support because I happen to believe the election was rigged at a level like nothing has ever been rigged before.”On 6 January, James Lankford of Oklahoma argued against certification, citing constituents’ concerns about voter fraud. He failed to mention it was Trump who spread that very concern.Hours later, however, the senator voted to certify. Months earlier, Tulsa was the venue for Trump’s infamous comeback rally, a flop which cost Brad Parscale his job as campaign manager and Herman Cain his life.Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarmingRead moreLiz Cheney also makes a telling appearance in Rucker and Leonnig’s story. In a 7 January call with Gen Milley, the Wyoming congresswoman unloaded on Jim Jordan, a hard-right Ohio representative and Trump favorite, as a “son of a bitch”.Stuck with Jordan during the Capitol siege, Cheney discounted his expressions of concern, saying: “Get away from me. You fucking did this.” Cheney is now a member of the House select committee charged with investigating the riot.Leonnig and Rucker also quote Doris Kearns Goodwin: “There is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the civil war.”Politicians and acolytes make pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mecca in Palm Beach. Each dusk, Leonnig and Rucker write, he receives a standing ovation.Just the way he likes it.
I Alone Can Fix It is published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury
TopicsBooksPolitics booksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS elections 2020US Capitol attackreviewsReuse this content More
BooksDrunken Giuliani urged Trump to ‘just say we won’ on election night, book saysAs key states started to slip away from Trump, Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged former president to lie, according to new book
US politics – live coverage
Martin Pengelly in Washington@ More
BooksLandslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming Fire and Fury infuriated a president and fueled a publishing boom. Its latest sequel is required reading for anyone who fears for American democracyLloyd GreenMon 12 Jul 2021 19.00 EDTThe 45th president is out of office and Michael Wolff has brought his Trump trilogy to a close. First there was Fire and Fury, then there was Siege, now there is Landslide. The third is the best of the three, and that is saying plenty.Frankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from TrumpworldRead moreThree years ago, Trump derided Fire and Fury as fake news and threatened Wolff with a lawsuit. Now, Trump talks to Wolff on the record about what was and might yet be, while the author takes a long and nuanced view of the post-election debacle. Wolff describes Trump’s wrath-filled final days in power.Aides and family members have stepped away, leaving the president to simmer, rage and plot with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and other conspiracy theorists, all eager to stoke the big lie about a stolen election. Giuliani calls Powell “crazy”. Powell holds Giuliani in similar regard. “I didn’t come here to kiss your fucking ring,” she tells the former New York mayor.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is elsewhere, hammering out the “Abraham Accords”, seeking to leave his mark on the world with some sort of step towards Middle East peace. Hope Hicks, a favorite Trump adviser, has gone. Two cabinet secretaries of independent wealth, Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, say adiós. As with hurricanes and plagues, the rich know when to head for high ground.Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s fourth and final press secretary, is awol. Even Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s ultra-loyal chief of staff, has resigned rather than bear witness to the president’s implosion in the aftermath of the deadly assault on the US Capitol.Wolff’s interview with Trump is notable. It is held in the lobby at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort to which Trump retreated. The club’s “throne room”, in the author’s words, is filled with “blond mothers and blond daughters, infinitely buxom”. Fecundity and lust on parade. A palace built in its creator’s image.The interview is an exercise in Trumpian score-settling. He brands Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor brutally fired from the transition in 2016, a “very disloyal guy” – apparently as payback for a debate preparation session that stung Trump with its ferocity, laying bare his vulnerabilities as others watched.Christie told Trump what he didn’t want to hear about his handling of Covid-19. He bandied about expressions such as “blood on your hands” and “failure”. He also reminded Trump that while Hunter Biden, his opponent’s scandal-magnet son, was a one-off, there was a whole bunch of Trump kids to target. Their father was unamused.Turning to the supreme court, Trump lashes out at Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, the chief justice. Trump accuses Kavanaugh of lacking courage and vents his “disappointment” in his most controversial pick for the bench. Under Roberts, the justices refused to overturn the election. So Trump had little use for them. He also takes aim at the Republican leader in the House. Apparently, Kevin McCarthy’s abject prostration still left something to be desired.Trump calls Andrew Cuomo, now New York’s governor but once, in a way, Trump’s own lawyer, a “thug”. He has kind words for Roy Cohn, another Trump lawyer, before that an aide to Joe McCarthy in the witch-hunts of the 1950s who wore that four-letter word far better. But he’s long dead. Bill Barr, the attorney general who made the Mueller report go away but wouldn’t back the big lie and resigned before the end, fares badly.Trump laments four years of “absolute scum and treachery and fake witch-hunts”. Introspection was never his strongest suit. “I’ve done a thousand things that nobody has done,” he claims. Landslide homes in on the bond between Trump and his supporters. Wolff sees that the relationship is unconventional and organic. Trump was never just a candidate. He also led a movement: “He knew nothing about government, they knew nothing about government, so the context of government itself became beside the point.” The bond was rooted in charisma. Trump was “the star – never forget that – and the base was his audience”.Landslide acknowledges that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election were born of his disregard for democratic norms and inability to acknowledge defeat. His legal and political arguments wafted out of the fever swamps of the fringes. As drowning men lunge for lifebelts, so Trump, Giuliani and Powell clung on.Wolff is open to criticism when he argues that the path between the 6 January insurrection and Trump is less than linear. Those who stormed the Capitol may well have been Trump’s people, Wolff argues, but what happened was not his brainchild. Six months ago, Trump also put distance between himself and the day’s events. Not any more.Trump has embraced the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, the air force veteran who endeavored to storm the House chamber, where members were sheltering in place.“Boom,” he said on 7 July. “Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied?”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreBeyond that, ProPublica has produced a paper trail that supports the conclusion senior Trump aides knew the rally they staged near the White House on 6 January could turn chaotic. What more we learn will depend on a House select committee.Wolff also fails to grapple with the trend in red states towards wresting control of elections from the electorate and putting them into the hands of Republican legislatures.Trump’s false contention that the presidential election was stolen is now an article of faith among Republicans and QAnon novitiates. Ballot “audits” funded by dark money are a new fixture of the political landscape. Democracy looks in danger.Trump tells Wolff his base “feel cheated – and they are angry”. Populism isn’t about all of the people, just some of them. As for responsibility, Trump washes his hands. On closing Wolff’s third Trump book, it seems possible it will not be his last after all. All the trauma of 2020 may just have been prelude to a Trump-Biden rematch.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationMichael WolffUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More
BooksFrankly, We Did Win This Election review: a devastating dispatch from Trumpworld As well as grabby headlines about Hitler, Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal shows us how millions have been led astrayLloyd GreenSat 10 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 10 Jul 2021 03.11 EDTOn election night in 2016, Donald Trump paid homage to America’s “forgotten men and women”, vowing they would be “forgotten no longer”. Those who repeatedly appeared at his rallies knew of whom he spoke. Veterans, gun enthusiasts, bikers, shop clerks. Middle-aged and seniors. Life had treated some harshly. Others less so.Trump told chief of staff Hitler ‘did a lot of good things’, book saysRead moreSome had voted for Barack Obama, only to discover hope and change wasn’t all it was advertised to be. Regardless, the Democratic party’s urban and urbane, upstairs-downstairs coalition didn’t mesh with them. Or vice-versa. Politics is definitely about lifestyles.In his new book, Michael Bender pays particular attention to those Trump supporters who called themselves “Front Row Joes”. They attended rallies wherever, whenever. It was “kind of like an addiction”, Bender quotes one as saying.No longer did they need to bowl alone. Trump had birthed a community. Their applause was his sustenance, his performance their sacrament.One Front Row Joe, Saundra from Michigan, was a 41-year-old Walmart worker. On 6 January, in Washington DC, she made her way up the west side of the US Capitol.“It looked so neat,” she said.She also said she and other Trump supporters who stormed Congress did not do so “to steal things” or “do damage”. They had a different aim.“We were just there to overthrow the government.”The next day, Saundra flew home. Trump’s wishes, real or imagined, were her command. Later in January, two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Senator Mitch McConnell declared that the mob had been “fed lies” and provoked by Trump.Bender covers the White House for the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, We Did Win This Election is his first book. It is breezy, well-written and well-informed. He captures both the infighting in Trump’s world and the surrounding social tectonics.Trump goes on the record. The interview is a solid scorecard on who is up or down. He brands McConnell “dumb as a rock”. The loathing is mutual – to a point. The Senate minority leader has made clear he will back Trump if he is the nominee again.Liz Cheney occupies a special spot in Trump’s Inferno. The Wyoming representative, daughter of a vice-president, now sits on a House select committee to investigate 6 January. But to most of Trump’s party, six months after the insurrection, what happened that afternoon is something to be forgotten or at least ignored.Mike Pence dwells in purgatory.“I don’t care if he apologizes or not,” Trump says of his vice-president presiding over the certification of Biden’s win. “He made a mistake.”Once before, in their second year in office, the two men reportedly clashed over a political hiring decision. Back then, Trump reportedly called Pence “so disloyal”.Pence still harbors presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.Bender’s book is laden with attention-grabbing headlines. He reports Trump telling John Kelly, then White House chief of staff, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”. Trump denies it. Kelly stays mum. More than 30 years ago, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, let it be known that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Everyone needs a hobby.Bender writes of Trump urging the military to “beat the fuck” out of protesters for racial justice, and to “crack their skulls”. The 45th president’s asymmetrical approach to law enforcement remains on display. “Stand back and stand by” was for allies like the Proud Boys. Law and order was for everyone else. Political adversaries were enemies.Trump now embraces the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, an air force veteran who stormed Congress on 6 January and was killed by law enforcement.“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt,” he said this week. “Boom. Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that.”To say the least, that is highly contestable.Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, cowered behind the doors Babbitt rushed. Hours later, the bulk of the House GOP opposed certifying Biden’s win. The party of Lincoln is now the party of Trump.Focusing on the 2020 election, a contest under the deathly shadow of Covid, Bender conveys the chaos and disorganization of the Trump campaign. After a disastrous kick-off rally in Tulsa, Trump began looking for a new campaign manager. Brad Parscale’s days were numbered. He was a digital guy, not a major domo.According to Bender, Trump offered the job to Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and niece of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, 2012 nominee and, in Trumpworld, persona decidedly non grata. Her reply: “Absolutely not.”Nightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national traumaRead moreTrump also sent word to Steve Bannon, his campaign chair in 2016. He declined too. Bannon was banished from the kingdom for trashing Trump and his family. But he understood the base better than anyone – other than Trump himself.There was a reason Saturday Night Live spoofed Bannon as the power behind the throne, and that he appeared on the cover of Time. There was no return to court but Trump did pardon Bannon of federal fraud charges. Not a bad consolation prize.Parscale was demoted and kicked to the curb. Within months he appeared in the news, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and armed. His successor, Bill Stepien, brought Trump to within 80,000 votes of another electoral college win.Bender makes clear that Trump is neither gone nor forgotten. His acquittal in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack, only reinforced his desire to fight another day.“There has never been anything like it,” Trump tells Bender. So true.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US Capitol attackUS politicsPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More
BooksRupert Murdoch approved Fox News Arizona call that signaled Trump defeat, book says
Loss of Arizona signalled Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat
Murdoch reportedly said: ‘Fuck him’
US politics – live coverage
Martin Pengelly in Washington@ More
BooksNightmare Scenario review: Trump, Covid and a lasting national trauma Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Washington Post show how bad things got – and how they could have been worseLloyd GreenSat 3 Jul 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 3 Jul 2021 02.21 EDTAs the world wakes from its pandemic-induced coma, Bloomberg rates the US as the best place to be. More than 150 million Americans have been vaccinated; little more than 4,100 have been hospitalized or have died as a result of breakthrough infection.Trump contempt for White House Covid taskforce revealed in new bookRead moreThe vaccines worked – but too late to save more than 600,000 Americans who have died. More than 500,000 were on Donald Trump’s watch.“This would have been hard regardless of who was president,” a senior administration official confided to Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. “With Donald Trump, it was impossible.”Abutaleb is a health policy writer for the Washington Post. Paletta is its economics editor. Together, they supply a bird’s-eye narrative of a chaotic and combative response to a pandemic that has subsided but not disappeared in the west. Elsewhere, it still rages.At almost 500 pages, Nightmare Scenario depicts an administration riven by turf wars, terrified of losing re-election and more concerned about the demands of Trump and his base than broader constituencies and realities. It was always “them” v “us”. Sadly, this is what we expected.Under the subtitle “Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic that Changed History”, Abutaleb and Paletta confirm that life in the Trump White House was Stygian bleak. Trump was the star. Pain and insecurity were the coins of the realm.Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, laboured in constant fear of Trump and competitors inside the government. After taking a hard line against flavoured e-cigarettes early on, to Trump’s dismay, Azar never recovered. The pandemic simply deepened his personal nightmare.When Covid struck, he was all but a dead man walking. Then the White House Covid taskforce, headed by Mike Pence, neutered his authority. Think of it as a one-two punch. True to form, Trump told a taskforce member Azar was “in trouble” and that he, Trump, had “saved him”.Azar was forced to take on Michael Caputo, an acolyte of Roger Stone, as spokesman. Eventually, Caputo posted a Facebook video in which he claimed “hit squads [were] being trained all over this country”, ready to mount an armed insurrection to stop a second Trump term. Caputo embarked on a two-month medical leave. His “mental health … definitely failed”.Not surprisingly, Trump lost patience with Pence’s taskforce. It failed to deliver a magic bullet and he dismissed it as “that fucking council that Mike has”. For the record, in April 2020 Pence remarked: “Maybe I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, but I think the country is ready to reopen.” For all of his obsequiousness, Pence could never make Trump happy.Instead, Peter Navarro, Scott Atlas and Stephen Moore emerged as Trump’s go-to guys. Predictably, mayhem ensued.Navarro suggested his PhD in economics made him an expert in medicine as well. He jousted with Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease since 1984 – seemingly for giggles.Atlas was a radiologist whose understanding of infectious diseases was tangential. As for Moore, he played emissary for a libertarian donor base distraught by shutdowns and mask mandates.“Fauci is the villain here,” Moore intoned. “He has the Napoleon complex, and he thinks he is the dictator who could decide how to run the country.” Trump’s own authoritarian streak seems to have escaped him.Moore also referred to Fauci as “Fucky”, and advised state-based “liberation” movements against public health measures that served as precursors and incubators to the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January this year.Going back to 2019, Moore was forced to withdraw from consideration for the board of the Federal Reserve after the Guardian reported on his bouts of alimony-dodging, contempt of court and tax delinquency.With one major exception – financing and developing a vaccine – the Trump administration left Covid to the states. Hydroxychloroquine never saved the day, though Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, ordered a bunch of it from India to sate Trump’s ego. Six days after the 2020 election, the National Institutes of Health issued a statement that insisted: “Hydroxychloroquine does not benefit adults hospitalized with Covid-19.” Trump was callous and mendacious before the pandemic. Yet even as he embraced medical quackery, bleach injections and self-pity, he presided over unprecedented vaccine development, the medical equivalent of winning the space race and the cold war at once.Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all tooRead moreWhen Trump signed off on Operation Warp Speed in May 2020, “he thought vaccines were too pie in the sky”, Abutaleb and Paletta report. When Trump learned the first contract executed under the program was with AstraZeneca, from the UK, he growled: “This is terrible news. I’m going to get killed.”Boris Johnson would “have a field day”, he said. Things didn’t work out that way.Right now, countries that relied on Chinese vaccines are experiencing a death spike in the face of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, almost seven in 10 are fully vaccinated – yet deaths per capita are currently running at the highest rate in the world.Added to Chinese opacity surrounding its role in the outbreak, the limits of vaccine diplomacy and technology are apparent. From the looks of things, Trump has left multiple legacies, some more complex and alloyed than others. But things could have been worse.TopicsBooksCoronavirusInfectious diseasesPolitics booksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationreviewsReuse this content More
Donald Trump told supporters he would march on the Capitol with them on 6 January – then abandoned them after a tense exchange with his chief of staff, according to the first excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump White House exposé.The extract was published by New York magazine. Wolff’s first Trump book, Fire and Fury, blew up a news cycle and created a whole new genre of salacious political books in January 2018, when the Guardian revealed news of its contents.That book was a huge bestseller. A sequel, Siege, also contained bombshells but fared less well. Wolff’s third Trump book is among a slew due this summer.On 6 January, Congress met to confirm results of an election Trump lost conclusively to Joe Biden. Trump spoke to supporters outside the White House, telling them: “We’re going to walk down [to the Capitol to protest] – and I’ll be there with you.”According to Wolff, the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was reportedly approached by concerned Secret Service agents, who he told: “No. There’s no way we are going to the Capitol.”Wolff, one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he left power, writes that the chief of staff then approached Trump, who seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol,” Meadows reportedly said. “How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump reportedly replied.Trump is also reported to have expressed “puzzlement” about the supporters who broke into the Capitol in a riot which led to five deaths and Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting an insurrection.Wolff says Trump was confused by “who these people were with their low-rent ‘trailer camp’ bearing and their ‘get-ups’, once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about ‘the great unwashed’.”Trump and his family watched the attack on television at the White House.As reported by Wolff, the exchange between Trump and Meadows sheds light on how the would-be insurrectionists were abandoned.The White House, Wolff writes, soon realised Mike Pence had “concluded that he was not able to reject votes unilaterally or, in effect, to do anything else, beyond playing his ceremonial role, that the president might want him to do”.Trump aide Jason Miller is portrayed as saying “Oh, shit” and alerting the president’s lawyer and chief cheerleader for his lie about electoral fraud, Rudy Giuliani.Wolff writes that the former New York mayor was “drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania”.As the riot escalated – soon after Trump issued a tweet attacking the vice-president – aides reportedly pressed the president to command his followers to stand down.Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, reportedly saw the assault on the Capitol as “an optics issue”. After an hour or so, Wolff writes, Trump “seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election – defending him so he would defend them – to seeing them as ‘not our people’”.In a further exchange, Trump reportedly asked Meadows: “How bad is this? This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats.”Trump reportedly added: “We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!” More
