Jonathan Karl explains…
Highly recommended: Bill Kristol sits down with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, whose new book lays out all the ways that Trump tried to subvert the 2020 election.
Some excerpts:
On Trump’s reaction to January 6 and security threats to Mike Pence
KARL: [When I interviewed him in March 2021], the thing that really blew me away was how positively he looked back at January 6. I wanted to ask him about that tweet he did, at the end of January 6, where he said, “remember this day forever.” I asked why. What do you want people to remember about it? He has said some of this stuff elsewhere, that this was the biggest crowd he ever spoke to in his entire life, that they all came there for him from all across the country. And it was just the best, most loving. And yeah, it got marred a little bit later. That was the only hint that he gave that there was something wrong with January 6.I’ve interviewed him a lot. I spent a lot of time around him, but this was the most shocking thing that he had ever said to me. “Was he worried about Mike Pence?” I asked. And he said “no, no. I heard he was just fine.” And I said “but you heard those chants. That was terrible.” And he says, “well, they were angry.” And when I said, “they were chanting hang Mike Pence!” Literally the next words out of his mouth were: “it’s common sense, Jon.” He's not saying that Pence should have been executed, I don’t think. But the fact that I’m bringing up this [outrageous] thing, and he’s not taking a beat to say “well, that’s crazy.” [Actually] there’s no hint [from what he said] that there's even a problem with that.
On Trump’s sustained efforts to delegitimize the election beginning in early 2020
KARL: [Once the pandemic hit Trump’s advisors told him] reelection was going to be an uphill battle. Brad Parscale, the way he put it to him was, “look, you were going to win. A landslide….And then COVID happened, it’s really bad.” So Trump knew that there was a real chance he was going to lose the election. He was being told this by his political team. And if they’re telling him bad news, the news has to be really bad. And so sometimes Trump really does just say it out loud. And so he said “the only way we can lose is if they steal it from us.” This is stuff he said in his rallies. He said a variation of that more than once.
On Trump’s purge of non-loyalists in the months leading up to the election
KARL: Trump laid the groundwork for everything he did far in advance of Election Day. I try to show how this was really building up to the culmination that we saw for nearly a year. My book starts right as he is acquitted in the first impeachment trial. And he brings in Johnny McEntee, his loyal, former personal assistant, and puts him in charge of presidential personnel. And the first order of business is to fire everybody who had anything to do with helping in the investigation related to Ukraine. McEntee had just turned 29. And as Mick Mulvaney remarked to me later, we were putting somebody in charge of presidential personnel and all the hiring and firing of political appointees in the entire executive branch of the U.S. government who had never hired a person in his life…. He had been the “body guy,” the guy who carries the bags. But he was unflinchingly loyal. And he would often tell Trump about people that he felt in the White House that were not sufficiently loyal. And so originally you have the Sandilands and the Vindmans and the people directly associated with that first impeachment trial—these are fired immediately. But then there’s this effort to cull the executive branch of anybody who has insufficient exuberance in their loyalty for the great Donald Trump.
On efforts by Trump officials to “manage” Trump in the waning days of his presidency
KARL: There is a famous meeting, which the New York Times first reported about and then I got much more detail on, on November 12 about Iran. Trump is asking for military options to take out the nuclear program. This is November 12. This is right after the election, right after the results are out and after he’s brought in his new leadership. And I recount how the new acting Defense Secretary, Chris Miller, is telling him how it can be done and saying it very much can be done. After that meeting, I report the Secretary of State, Pompeo, who had been the ultimate Trump loyalist for really the entire time, called up Bill Barr, the Attorney General, who was not in that meeting, to say that he was really concerned about developments at the Pentagon. And the concern was that Trump could do something dramatic just to try to [throw things in chaos.]So it’s really astonishing that Pompeo is calling Barr and saying “we might have a problem on our hands.” Just as an aside, it’s amazing that Pompeo is still out there pretending like he’s the ultimate Trump loyalist and speaking of the great successes of the Trump administration, which he was so central to in his telling. He never hints at this. I also talk about how he was very much involved in the 25th amendment consideration after January 6. Still out there pretending like he’s the ultimate Trumpist. But he saw the danger firsthand and was quite alarmed by it.
On how things might have gone differently
KARL: If McEntee had had his way and had completed his work by the time we got to this transition period, maybe there wouldn’t have been a transition, because the people that were there would’ve been totally and completely loyal. So Chad Wolf over at the Department of Homeland Security is being asked to examine his voting machines because Barr has refused. So now we got this other “so you do it, Chad,” and he refuses. Pence refused, obviously, on January 6 to do what Trump wanted. Barr, Pence, Wolf, to a degree Pompeo. But what if there had been total and complete loyalists in each of those jobs?What could have happened? These people did ultimately stand up to Trump, even though they don’t necessarily want to advertise it much after the fact. One of the first interviews I did for the book was with somebody I can’t name, but he was a very prominent and important official in the national security space during the Trump administration, very thoughtful and not in any way considered a ‘deep state guy.’ He was loyal to Trump. But he said to me at the end of the interview: “I’m just horrified at the thought of what a second term would’ve looked like, who would’ve been in the cabinet.”