‘Pompeo Was Concerned Trump Would Start a War’: Michael Bender on His Book Detailing the ‘Unhinged’ and ‘Violent’ Final Moments of the Trump Presidency
By the time President Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election, the thing that most alarmed his few remaining staffers was not the inescapable chaos that had enveloped the White House. It was a fear that Trump would do anything to hold on to power.
That’s according to Michael Bender, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of the new book, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.
I spoke to Bender about his shocking reporting, which details the unhinged final chapter of the Trump presidency, on this week’s episode of The Interview.
“They were concerned that he would he had been so desperate to hold on to office that he had turned violent and reckless and really unhinged in the lengths he would go to in order to keep his keep his grip on power,” Bender said.
The book is a thoroughly reported and terrifying account of the last year, as Trump reckoned with protests against police brutality and the explosion of the Covid pandemic, a disease that almost killed Trump himself just weeks before the 2020 election.
The book, for which Bender twice visited Mar-a-Lago for lengthy interviews with the former president, details what happened behind the scenes of the ailing Trump campaign, his alarming efforts to overturn the results of the election, and the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol that brought a violent conclusion to the presidency.
Throughout those final months, Bender said it came down to the top general in the United States — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley — to stop Trump from carrying out his more dangerous fantasies.
“This was a president who told his military to shoot Americans, shoot Americans who are protesting police brutality in the streets,” Bender said. “His own secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was concerned that Trump would start a war, lean into international conflict after November 7th as a way to keep his grip on power. These are extremely dangerous situations that through this book show how close we came to the brink there.”
We discussed Bender’s interviews with Trump as the former president climatizes to life in Mar-a-Lago (it involves a lot of golfing and phone calls from Sean Hannity), what happened when he tried to defend Adolf Hitler during a debate with John Kelly, and how Bender managed to bust out a book in the madness of the last year.
Download the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
