Yet again, a top former Trump administration official has published a memoir containing explosive revelations about former president Donald Trump — this time coming
from former defense secretary Mark T. Esper.
Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.
And as each tell-all has emerged, it has been rightly noted that much of this information would have been relevant far earlier — say, when Trump was twice facing impeachment, or in the run-up to both Election Day 2020 and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Critics — even those inclined to like what the books have to say — have gone after the authors for not speaking out sooner, and accused them of cashing in rather than blowing the whistle when it mattered.
Given that roiling debate, it’s worth looking at precisely what four of them — Esper, William P. Barr, John Bolton and Stephanie Grisham — said during their tenures, when they left and when they decided to finally speak out.
6 bombshell claims made in flurry of new Trump books a flurry of books are hitting stores that delve into the final year of his chaotic presidency.
Gen. Mark Milley told aides he feared Trump would call on the government to stage a coup after his election defeat.
Bender also writes in “Frankly” that Trump praised Hitler in a conversation with former White House chief of staff John Kelly.
The alleged comment happened during a trip to Paris in 2018 to commemorate the armistice after World War I when Kelly was explaining to Trump who the allies and adversaries were in both World Wars.
"Well, Hitler did a lot of good things," Trump told Kelly,
On election night, it was Rudy Giuliani who urged Trump to “just say we won,” according to Leonnig and Rucker’s “I Alone Can Fix It.”
The authors write that Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, asked campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior adviser Jason Miller and Meadows about where the races in Michigan and Pennsylvania stood. When told it was too early to say, Giuliani responded, “Just say we won,” the book claims.
“Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing,” according to the book. “Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.”
Meadows, the authors write, responded angrily: “We can’t do that. We can’t.”
Trump, of course, declared victory in the early-morning hours after election day and then proceeded to falsely claim he only lost because of widespread election fraud.
Furious about bunker story leak
According to Bender, the former president was so angry that someone leaked to the press that he was taken to the White House’s underground bunker during Black Lives Matter protests outside the White House that he told aides, “Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason! They should be executed!”
"Trump boiled over about the bunker story as soon as they arrived and shouted at them to smoke out whoever had leaked it. It was the most upset some aides had ever seen the president," Bender writes in “Frankly.”
Meadows tried to calm down the president by telling him, “I'm on it. We're going to find out who did it,” the book says. Trump repeatedly asked Meadows for days afterward if he tracked down the leaker, with one aide saying the president was “obsessed” with finding the source.