During the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump wanted to Insurrection Act to shut them all down. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told Trump that he couldn't do that. Trump flew into a rage screaming, "You're not the president! I'm the god damn president!"
"I'm not sure that there's another president in the United States who said anything like that at any point in the Oval Office because every previous holder of that office, I think, was pretty confident at all times who the president was," said O'Donnell.
Dr. Trump agreed, saying that they were confident, but they actually understood how the government worked and Trump never really understood what that role was other than the title.
"Donald had no authority to invoke the Insurrection Act under those circumstances, and the fact that he felt thwarted just tells us how dangerous it is to put somebody in a position of that much power who, one, doesn't understand what his job is, and, two, is unwilling to learn and, three, feels entitled to having absolute control and power," said Dr. Trump. "So, I think that we really dodged a bullet in the sense that Donald didn't have quite enough time to install his cronies at the various departments because he was on his way to doing just that."
She went on to explain that there is a very real need for the government to shore up some of the rules and regulations that could protect the country from someone like Trump in the future.
O'Donnell said that one thing that struck him in the book is how many Republican leaders realized that Trump was exactly what Democrats warned.
"A stream of people from Paul Ryan on, saying 'I just can't believe what this guy is like,' and they all -- I don't get it because he seemed incredibly, totally transparent to me as a campaigner for the president," said O'Donnell. "He was absolutely consistent as a deranged campaigner for the presidency. He was advertising that the presidency will have a deranged person in the Oval Office, and these people ended up being surprised that he really was as crazy as he appeared to be."
Dr. Trump accused the Republicans of trying to revise history and cover themselves after the fact.
"If they were paying the slightest bit of attention, they know exactly who they were dealing with," she said. "He was the same in 2015 as he was in 2020 as he was in 2000, you know? So, it's just a way of changing the narrative away from their responsibility, which they refuse to admit, which is, again, another problem. They didn't stay and try to fix the problem. They ran away from it."
See the interview below:
Donald didn't become more unstable after the election — he was already unstable
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