In what may be the most explosive account to date of former US president Donald Trump’s presidency, a new book takes a deep dive into his divisive four-year tenure in Washington, from “the chaotic beginning to the violent finale”.
The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser, includes interviews with more than 300 people, releasing bombshell anecdotes and interviews far closer to the truth than reported at the time.
Doubleday Publishers says the duo interviewed Donald Trump, cabinet officers, military generals, close advisers, Trump family members, congressional leaders and foreign officials.
Some have never told their story until now.
Although we know the former president was complacent about the COVID-19 pandemic, and how to control and manage it – remember he took anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to prevent infection – it has emerged it was his wife and former first lady Melania who pushed her husband to take the virus seriously.
She was “rattled by the coronavirus and convinced that Trump was screwing up”, CNN reported in an early book review.
“In a phone call with former New Jersey [Governor] Chris Christie, who maintained ties to the White House despite occasional criticism of Trump, Melania Trump sought help convincing her husband to take the pandemic more seriously.
“You’re blowing this,” she recalled telling her husband.
“This is serious. It’s going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you’re taking it.”
He had just dismissed her.
“You worry too much,’’ she remembered him saying. ‘Forget it’.”
Baker, who took to social media on Thursday to say they “withheld no revelations while he was president”, said “everything new in the book comes from our research in the 18 months since he left office”.
“There is no doubt still more to learn and we’re looking forward to the continuing reporting by our colleagues to inform us further about what happened,” he said.
“In fact, like other reporters, we worked assiduously day after day for four years to report everything we could learn about Trump in real time.
“Then after he left office, we embarked on this project to unearth what we did not know at the time,” he said.
Book delivers ‘new revelations aplenty’
In the book, the best-selling authors of The Man Who Ran Washington, Baker and Glasser compare Trump to the “velociraptors in Jurassic Park”.
They are the prehistoric creatures “that gradually figure out how to corner their new human prey (the prey in this case being American democracy)”, according to a review in the Washington Post.
Organisations that backed the GOP, including for example, the National Rifle Association were not mentioned, but the Post says the book is “the most comprehensive and detailed account of the Trump presidency yet published”.
“Fresh and alarming” scoops in the book include a chapter called ‘My Generals’.
“Baker and Glasser describe how Trump was so frustrated with his military commanders for refusing his various strong-arm orders that he asked Chief of Staff (and retired general) John Kelly why his generals couldn’t be more like Adolf Hitler’s during World War II.
“When Kelly retorted that those generals had tried to kill Hitler, Trump replied, ‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him’ – as if that was what should be remembered about the Nazi regime,” the Post wrote.
Mr Trump wanted to arrest and lock up rival Joe Biden, now US President.
“The authors reveal a set of exchanges between Trump and Attorney-General William Barr that suggest the president was truly serious about his tweet threats to lock up election rival Joe Biden.
“That p—ed me off,” Barr said in the book.
Another bombshell was Mr Trump’s “unprecedented bombardment” of the Food and Drug Administration to approve a coronavirus vaccine before the US election on November 2 last year (it didn’t).
He accused the independent agency of “sabotaging the election effort”.
CNN was also given a review copy.
During a dinner in New York with the late then-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, Mr Trump’s self-obsessions escalated to new heights.
“The president asked Abe over dinner to nominate him [for the Nobel Peace Prize],” a senior Trump national security official says in the book.
It revealed Mr Trump “once abruptly phoned Jordan’s King Abdullah II to inform him he was ‘going to give you the West Bank’.”
This reportedly prompted the monarch to tell a friend he thought he was having a heart attack: “I couldn’t breathe. I was bent doubled over.”
Mr Trump told the authors he wouldn’t be inviting Mike Pence to be on his 2025 ticket because he refused to interfere in the certification of the 2020 election.
“It would be totally inappropriate … Mike committed political suicide by not taking votes that he knew were wrong.”
There were several other dangerous fixations, including siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin, fears of being assassinated by the Iranians (shared over cocktails at Mar-a-Lago) and a sustained campaign for the US to withdraw from NATO.
Buying Greenland from Denmark went far deeper than previously disclosed.
“‘I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different’,” Mr Trump told the authors.
The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, Doubleday Publishing, September 20
