The extent of Donald Trump’s frustrations over the timing of his multiple scheduled court appearances in the thick of the 2024 presidential race, as well as the disdain with which he treats his own lawyers, is laid bare in a new book by Jonathan Karl.
The Washington correspondent for ABC News reveals Trump’s furious reaction when told by a Manhattan judge earlier this year that his criminal trial in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case would start on 25 March 2024. That places it right in the middle of the Republican primaries, and just 20 days before the all-important Super Tuesday in which 15 states decide their preferred candidate.
Karl relates in his new book, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, how the former president responded angrily as he heard the date virtually as he sat in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.
He turned to one of his key lawyers, Todd Blanche, and yelled: “That’s in the middle of the primaries! If I lose the presidency, you are going to be the reason!”
Trump’s tantrum lasted almost half an hour, Karl reports, based on an anonymous source present in the room. When the court hearing was over, and the cameras were turned off, the former president launched what Karl describes as “a withering attack on perhaps the most highly regarded lawyer on Trump’s troubled legal team”.
“You little fucker!” Trump shouted in Blanche’s face. “You are going to cost me the presidency!” He went on to rant against other lawyers in his team, saying: “They want me to be indicted!”
Tired of Winning is the third of a series of Trump books by Karl. The previous volumes – Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal – have both been bestsellers.
The latest book will go on sale in the US on 14 November. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Karl’s book lands in a week in which the highs and lows of Trump’s current fortunes are in plain sight. On Monday he was forced to testify, tetchily, in the New York fraud trial that threatens to derail his entire business empire.
On a happier note for him, a New York Times/Siena College poll puts Trump ahead of Joe Biden in five of the six critical swing states where the 2024 presidential election, now a year away, will be won. The survey underlines how Trump appears so far to be unscathed by the historic 91 felony charges he faces, though it also provides a warning that if he is convicted and sentenced, voters in the battleground states could punish him by switching to Biden.
Tired of Winning recounts how those close to Trump have consciously embraced the paradox that the indictments appear to have strengthened his standing within the Republican party. Karl relates that days before he was indicted in the Daniels case, in which Trump is accused of making illegal payments to an adult movie star to cover up an alleged affair, his former senior adviser in the White House Steve Bannon mused that Trump could turn his legal plight to political advantage.
“This week, Trump could lock down the nomination if he played his cards right,” Karl says Bannon told him. “‘They’re crucifying me,’ you know, ‘I’m a martyr.’ All that. You get everybody so riled up that they just say, ‘Fuck it. I hate Trump, but we’ve got to stand up against this.’”
The harsh words that Trump had for Blanche at a time when he arguably most needed his lawyer’s counsel goes some way to explain the umpteen fallings-out he has had with his inner circle. Karl writes that Hope Hicks, a former top adviser in Trump’s White House, had sharp words after she testified behind closed doors to the House committee investigating the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.
“Later, Hicks would tell friends she hoped Trump would read the transcript of her testimony once it was published. If he did, she said he’d hopefully never want to talk to her again.”
The book also contains a priceless anecdote about an exchange between then president Trump and the former German chancellor Angela Merkel. Following the engagement, he bragged to a Republican congressman, who promptly shared the story with Karl, that Merkel had gone out of her way to compliment Trump over the large crowds he attracted at his rallies.
“She said she could never get crowds like that,” Trump is reported to have gloated. “In fact, she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.”
Karl notes drily that the congressman was left wondering whether Trump had any idea of the individual to whom Merkel was alluding. “Which would be more unsettling: that he didn’t or that he did?” the author writes.
