THE VILLAGES, FLORIDA - OCTOBER 03: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at the Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center in The Villages on October 03, 2019 in The Villages, Florida. President Trump spoke about Medicare, and signed an executive order calling for further privatizing of it. Donald Trump. (Image: Getty)
New details about former President Donald Trump’s attempts to abuse the powers of his office have emerged after excerpts from three upcoming books were released this week. The excerpts deal with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, deploy the military against protestors and prosecute opponents.
Betrayal, by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl, shows Trump’s attempts to subvert election results with the aid of the Justice Department.
Then-Attorney General William Barr, formerly a Trump loyalist, eventually became an outspoken fact-checker of Trump’s voter fraud conspiracy theories.
According to the book excerpt, Trump invited Barr to his office on December 1 with “the eyes and mannerism of a madman.” Trump shouted at Barr and even started banging on his desk.
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Trump’s anger at Barr was not solely due to conspiracy theories over the election. He apparently also berated Barr for not prosecuting President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, or former FBI Director James Comey, two of his biggest political opponents.
Another book, Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency by journalist Michael Wolff, includes details about what happened during the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Excerpts from Wolff’s book were recently released in New York magazine. The excerpts claim that senior Trump advisers knew Trump was “deranged” but were too scared to crush his dream of overturning the election. According to the book, former Vice President Mike Pence was against Trump’s effort to nullify the results.
The book also claims that Trump staffers pleaded with the then-president to denounce the Capitol attacks publicly. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump reportedly said that the attack was only “an optics issue.”
The book Frankly, We Did Win This Election by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender details how Trump worked to invoke the Insurrection Act as well as use military force against social justice protests last summer. In the excerpts, Bender describes a shouting match between Trump and Mark Milley after Milley refused to be put “in charge” of military deployment to urban protest hubs.
Milley reportedly said: “God damn it! There’s a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?”
Trump has since spoken out about this incident, telling Axios that the argument “never happened.”
Bender claims that he interviewed “multiple senior administration officials” who all confirmed that the fight did, indeed, happen.
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