4 Wildest Claims From Michael Wolff’s New Book Excerpt, From Boozing Giuliani to Ivanka’s Actions on Jan. 6
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Michael Wolff, the author of several explosive best-sellers on the presidency of Donald Trump, is coming out with a third tome on the last administration. An excerpt of the latest book — Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency — was published by New York magazine on Monday and includes a series of bombshell claims about the final days of the Trump White House — specifically January 6, when a horde of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election.
It should be noted that Wolff has been accused of flouting journalistic rigor in his books on Trump (you can read his defense of his reporting here). With that in mind, here are the four wildest claims from the first excerpt from Landslide.
1. Trump’s advisers fled, and those remaining declined to tell him that Pence actually could not throw out the election
By January, many of Trump’s top advisers had fled the White House. Steve Mnuchin was in Sudan, Jared Kushner was in the Middle East. Kayleigh McEnany, according to Wolff, “had been strategically missing in action for several weeks.” (It would later turn out that McEnany was in the middle of applying for a job at Fox News).
A few aides remained, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, social media manager Dan Scavino, and adviser Jason Miller.
And as January 6 approached, Trump became convinced that Pence would reject the electors and thereby challenge Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election.
According to Wolff, all of the remaining aides knew that Pence was not going to reject the electors. But none had told Trump that. Even after the violence at the Capitol erupted, where supporters marched through the Capitol building seeking to lynch Pence, Trump was attacking his vice president over his refusal to even try.
2. Giuliani, allegedly sauced, fed delusion until the bitter end
While his aides knew Pence would not reject the electors, one outside adviser to Trump continued to insist on the delusion that he might.
Rudy Giuliani was described by Wolff as the only person, aside from Trump, who truly believed Pence could anoint Trump winner of the 2020 election.
“The president’s aides (and family) understood, too, that he was the only one (along with Giuliani, which only made the situation more alarming) in any professional political sphere to believe this,” Wolff wrote.
Giuliani was also described as a complete mess: ‘The one person Trump did have at his side, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania.”
“Both men, egged on by hypotheticals ever nearer to fantasy and after exhausting all other options, had come to take it as an article of faith that the vice-president could simply reject Biden electors in favor of Trump ones and thereby hand the election to Trump,” Wolff wrote.
Giuliani allegedly told Trump: “There is no question, none at all, that the VP can do this. That’s a fact. The Constitution gives him the authority not to certify. It goes back to the state legislatures.”
3. Team Trump tried to turn Parler into a post-presidency propaganda machine
As part of the Trump family’s efforts to get Donald to leave the White House in a sane fashion, they approached the social media platform Parler, which was popular with supporters of Trump and funded by the Mercers.
According to Wolff, the proposal was as follows:
They had floated a proposition that Trump, after he left office, become an active member of Parler, moving much of his social-media activity there from Twitter. In return, Trump would receive 40 percent of Parler’s gross revenues and the service would ban anyone who spoke negatively about him.
That last condition — which would outlaw speaking ill of the Dear Leader — was apparently not accepted by Parler, a platform whose entire raison d’être is a rejection of partisan moderation.
4. During the insurrection Ivanka was focused on her kids getting into a private school
Protestors began clashing with police at barriers outside the Capitol building around 1 p.m. After about an hour of violence, the mob breached the doors of the Capitol just after 2 p.m. Moments after Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber, Trump attacked him as a coward on Twitter. Around 2:30 p.m., aides convinced Trump to send out another tweet, written by Scavino, that urged the protestors to remain peaceful.
As the Capitol was being ransacked by a mob chanting “hang Mike Pence,” lawmakers were being evacuated, and one protestor trying to breach the Speaker’s Lobby was shot dead by police, Ivanka Trump was apparently pre-occupied.
Per Wolff:
Ivanka Trump had been floating around the West Wing, chatting to a variety of people. Her children had gotten into private school in Florida, and she was pleased about this — an excited topic of conversation. She was pulled away from her discussion about schools to join the increasingly tense debate about how to respond to the news.
Reality eventually set in:
At the same time, no one in the White House was seeing this as the full-on assault on the Capitol and the nail in the coffin of the Trump administration that the world would shortly understand it to be; they were, for perhaps another 90 minutes or so, still treating this as “an optics issue,” as Ivanka was putting it.
It wasn’t until later in the three o’clock hour that Trump seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election — defending him so he would defend them — to seeing them as “not our people.” Therefore, he bore no responsibility for them.
