"I don't really like the way the elephant's nose is shaped. The convention was almost half a year away. He was agonising over an insignificant detail: what the logo for the Republican National Convention should look like. The morning after ousting Mick Mulvaney as his chief of staff, as Covid cases had been detected in more than half of America's states and governors were imposing states of emergency, Trump was at Mar-a-Lago. Then I'd read another chapter detailing the president's failure to take his job seriously. But while reading the book I found myself returning, like the author, to the stories of Saundra Kiczenski, and Randal Thom, and the other regular Americans outside the halls of power who believed in Trump and believed that he cared about them. Lindell, Powell, Giuliani – they're all colourful characters. Lindell, unrepentant despite his own defamation lawsuit, is still insisting Trump will be reinstated as president, though he has backed away from his previous prediction that it will happen by mid-August. Trump ended up listening to just one man, Rudy Giuliani, who'd go on to lead his farcical efforts to get the election results overturned in court. And the saddest thing I've ever seen," one official told Bender.
He stood in the middle of the White House residence with a "confused, dejected look" as more than a dozen people shouted advice at him. (He didn't win it.)ĭespite months of baseless speculation about voter fraud before election day, it turns out Trump hadn't decided what to say until shortly before he walked out to face the cameras.īehind the scenes, around 2am, the president was reportedly "in shock that he hadn't won" the election. "Frankly, we did win this election," he said. He knew those votes would favour his opponent.
The book gets its name from Trump's quote late on election night, when he falsely claimed victory before a huge number of the votes in key states had been counted. When Bender visits Trump for his last interview with the former president, he's been hanging out at his Mar-a-Lago club, playing rounds of golf, basking in the adulation of his paying guests and moaning that he hasn't got enough credit for (supposedly) saving eight Republican Senate seats.Īshli Babbitt was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer. No acknowledgment of responsibility for the suffering he caused for his loyal supporters, let alone the rest of the country. Those other Trump supporters now facing prison sentences would be free.īut there's no self-reflection about his own role in what happened. If Trump had accepted the election result and encouraged a peaceful transition of power, as every other beaten president in US history has brought himself to do, none of this would have happened.īabbitt would not have been in Washington on January 6. It's coming from one of Donald Trump's most devoted supporters. "They were going to kill him in the street." It isn't the "liberal media" saying that. They were going to kill him in the street." "And if it wasn't by gunfire, he would have been pummelled. When the crowd poured into the Capitol Building a short time later, there were loud chants of "hang Mike Pence". But the people at Trump's January 6 rally near the White House were genuinely shocked when Pence released a statement saying he would not reject the electoral college votes. It was nonsense, and Pence had told him so in private at least "a dozen times". He told them the vice president, Mike Pence, had the power to unilaterally overturn his defeat. He urged them to come to Washington and march on Congress. She was drawn there by Trump's lies about the election. Why was this "innocent, wonderful, incredible woman", as Trump has called her, even there? What compelled her to join that mob, to confront police, to breach the Capitol in search of traitorous politicians? The answer is that Babbitt was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer, who remains unnamed, as she tried to force her way through a barricaded door and enter the Speaker's Lobby, adjacent to the House of Representatives.īut ask yourself, on a more fundamental level, why Babbitt was shot.
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