Donald Trump made a frantic call to a political fixer soon after his son Don Jr. claimed a powerful position in the former president's second bid to reclaim the White House, a new book reveals.
Trump called conservative consultant Susie Wiles in March 2022 as he and his son mounted a furious revenge campaign against Republicans such as former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) who had spoken out against the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021, writes political correspondent Meredith McGraw.
“It’s a f---ing mess,” Trump reportedly told Wiles. “I don’t know who’s in charge. I don’t know how much money I have. I don’t know if they’re stealing from me. I don’t know who’s who. I need you to fix it.”
This anecdote appears in McGraw's new book "Trump in Exile" which was excerpted Monday morning in Vanity Fair.
The book reveals a campaign in chaos as Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner took a large step away from Trump world politics and toward a jet-setting life in New York City.
It was a "strange and empty time" for Trump's Florida club Mar-a-Lago, which had plummeted in social ranks on the heels of an attempted White House takeover and amid an ongoing global pandemic, reports McGraw.
A meeting of political advisers in February to discuss political endorsements, targeting Republicans upon whom Trump was "hell-bent" on inflicting revenge, was stark, McGraw writes.
"Being associated with someone who inspired a bloody attack on the Capitol didn’t have the same social clout as being associated with a president," McGraw writes.
"The meeting was held in the empty tea room at Mar-a-Lago, a dining room just off the main living room...There was no set agenda. No one was in charge."
But Trump's advisers walked away with a distinct impression that Trump Jr. would play a larger role, according to McGraw.
"Trump Jr. looked forward to disappearing into the wilderness of Pennsylvania to hunt deer and was eager to make his own mark on the MAGA movement," she writes.
A target for Trump's wrath also emerged.
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"For the next year, it would be an all-hands-on-deck effort to identify and elevate a competitive candidate that could take down Cheney, the one Republican who dared to stand up against Trump and challenge the former president on January 6 and his falsehoods about the 2020 election," writes McGraw. "Trump’s political fate, they believed, rested on taking Cheney down."
Cheney would ultimately lose the Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed challenger, Harriet Hageman in August 2022, but it would take Wiles' help to get started, reports McGraw.
Wiles has worked for Trump twice before but did not consider herself a Trump insider, and was therefore surprised when Trump pleaded for just a "couple weeks of her time," according to McGraw.
"Except that getting Trump’s current operation in line, from fundraising to personnel, didn’t take two weeks—it took around two months," writes McGraw.
"Wiles—much to the relief of Trump’s family, who viewed her as trustworthy, and his longtime aides, who were happy to see an adult in the room—was now in charge."