Betrayal

 

Jonathan Karl, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show” Random House, 2021, 348 pp .

Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. Front Row at the Trump Show was an instant New York Times bestseller and now he has written his current book: Betrayal.

Picking up where the New York Times bestselling Front Row at the Trump Show left off, Betrayal takes a look at the aftermath of the election—and the events that followed Donald Trump’s leaving the White House.

Nobody is in a better position to tell the story than Jonathan Karl.  He is a reporter who has known Donald Trump longer than any other White House correspondent.

This is a definitive account of what was really going on during the final weeks and months of the Trump presidency and what it means for the future of the Republican Party, by a reporter who was there for it all.

My Notes:

Pg. 40:  To deploy federal troops requires the president to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows the president to deploy the military to quell rebellion.  This Act had not been invoked since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and even then, active-duty troops were authorized but not used on the streets of LA.  It was the California National Guard that was deployed. 

Pg. 81:  Christie in his role of preparing Trump for the 1^st debate responded to Trump’s constant attack on the need to investigate Hunter Biden: “You have real nerve talking about relatives taking advantage of political power, Christie said, playing the role of Biden.  “you’ve invited your daughter and son-in-law into the White House, and they made $36 million last year while they were doing the people’s business.  Your family traded the influence they have in the White House to make tens of millions of dollars.”  (The number Christie used was from a financial disclosure Ivanka and Jared were required to make.  In July 2020, the couple disclosed making between $36.2 million and $157 million in 2019.)  Trump became enraged and ended the practice session.

Pg. 84:  Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and another $750 in his first year in the White House.  He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Pg. 102f:  When Trump came down with Covid, the White House steadfastly refused to answer when the president had last tested negative for COVid-19. It appears he may well have been infected prior to the first debate.

Pg. 115f:  Some states—including Ohio, Georgia, Texas, and Florida—minimize the delay in counting mail-in votes by preparing the ballots to be counted as they are received.  But there are other states that don’t begin processing mail-in votes until after the polls close.  Under Pennsylvania law in 2020, for example, the envelopes containing ballots could not even be opened until after polls closed. 

Pg. 126:  As election night vote counting went on, Trump’s lead in swing states was rapidly dwindling.  Trump had been told by his advisors that if he received 65 million votes he would be the election winner.  His advisors were wrong, grossly underestimating how many people would turn out to vote for Biden, who ended up with more than eighty-one million votes to Trump’s seventy-four million.

Pg. 127:  The real incitement to violence happened at 2:30 a.m. on election night when Trump declared: “This (the election) is a fraud on the American public.  This is an embarrassment to our country.  We were getting ready to win this election.  Frankly, we did win this election.”  He then made his most outrageous claim, “We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court.  We want all voting to stop.  We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”  He then declared victory: “We will win this.  And as far as I’m concerned we already have won it.”  As bad as the events of January 6^th were, Trump had lit the fire that led to the insurrection. (pg. 130).

Pg. 129: When all the ballots were counted in Pennsylvania, Trump’s 690,000-vote lead was gone.  Biden won the state by 80,000 votes.

Pg. 142:  Monday, November 9, 2020, should have been a pretty good day to be president.  Pfizer had just announced its COVID vaccine was 90 percent effective.  Financial markets were rallying, the DJI average shot up more than eight hundred points. 

Pg. 221:  Under the US Electoral Count At of 1887, each state must certify its election results and assign its electoral votes the Wednesday after the second Monday in December.  In 2020, that date was December 14^th.  The results were 306 electoral votes for Biden and 232 for Trump.

Pg. 223:  Under the rules governing the counting of electoral votes, if even a single Republican senator joined House Republicans in objecting to any state’s electoral votes on January 6, a debate and a vote on whether to accept that state’s certified results would ensue. 

Pg. 229:  The first Trump tweet concerning January 6^th came on December 19^th, “Big protest in D.C on January 6^th, "Be there, will be wild!”. This tweet came the day after the Oval Office meeting with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn.

Pg. 246:  January 2, 2020, call to Raffensperger:  For more than twelve minutes the call is a Trump monologue.  He runs through a series of disproven and baseless allegations—dead people voting, illegal ballots, forged absentee votes, etc.—and then gets to the point: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have to get,” he tells Raffensperger.  This call may never had been made public had Trump not tweeted the next morning: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia.  He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the  ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.  He has no clue.”  To correct this misinformation, one of the people on the call released a recording of the call to The Washington Post. 

Pg. 268f:  On January 5, 2020, a lawyer named John Eastman joined the President in the Oval office.  This is the same Eastman who in August 2020 wrote an essay in Newsweek suggesting that Kamal Harris—who was born at Kaiser Hospital on October 20, 1961—was ineligible to be vice president because her parents were not born in the US.  Now, four months later, Eastman was convincing Trump that Pence could reject selected electoral votes.  Eastman even prepared a document outlining how this could be done.

Pg. 286:  “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” Trump said in a tweet posted eleven minutes after the first rioters broke into the Capitol as Trump knew as he was watching it on TV.

Pg. 299f:  Three hours after the Capitol was breached, Trump agreed to make a video.  On the video he said, “I know your pain, I know you’re hurt, Trump said in the message aimed directly at his supporters who were still rummaging through offices in the Capitol.  “We had an election that was stolen from us.  It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it.  Especially the other side.  But you have to go home now.  We have to have peace.  We have to have law and order.”  As the message went on, it was clear that Trump was really condemning the election, not the insurrection.  He went on to say, “This was a fraudulent election.  But we can’t play into the hands of these people.  We have to have peace.  So go home, We love you.  You are very special.”

Pg. 306:  Shortly before Congress reconvened after the riot on January 6^th, Trump’s Twitter account was suspended for the first time; Trump had nearly ninety million followers.  Twitter declared that Trump’s tweets praising the rioters contained “repeated and severe violations” of its civic integrity policy and posed a ‘risk of violence.”  Twitter warned that if the offending tweets were not removed, the temporary suspension of his account would become permanent. 

Pg. 313:  On January 7^th, Twitter unlocked Trump’s account after he agreed to delete his tweets glorifying the violence and to post a video message finally condemning the attack.  In the video message, Trump called the riot a ‘heinous attack on the US Capitol and acknowledged, for the first time, ‘a new administration will be inaugurated on January twentieth.’  Trump returned to Twitter.  By the next morning he was back to complaining about the election.  He then stated that he would not be attending the inauguration. Twitter then permanently suspended his account.  (It appears that Trump was not being invited to attend the inauguration, McConnel was preparing a letter disinviting him.)

Pg. 322f:  Ultimately the inauguration happened on schedule and without incident.  Here’s a list of just some of the obstacles Trump put forward and reasons the author believes the peaceful transfer of power that ultimately occurred was a miracle:

a.      Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger was pressured to find the 11,780 votes Trump needed, he refused to do this.

b.     Trump demanded Republican leaders of the state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Michigan overturn the elections in their states by sending to Washington Trump electoral votes instead of electoral votes for Biden, who actually won their states.

c.     Trump told his secretary of Homeland Security he wanted him to seize voting machines in states he lost.

d.     Judges in 60 cases rejected Trump’s lawsuits.  Some were conservative Republicans Trump had nominated.

e.     Trump bluntly demanded that the Supreme Court intervene and save his presidency.  They unanimously rejected his appeal.

f.      What if Bill Barr had followed the president’s orders and mobilized the considerable resources of the Department of Justice to overturn the election.  Barr’s successor, Jeffrey Rosen, also held the line.  And when Trump proposed replacing Rosen, many threatened to resign.

g.     Placed extreme pressure on Pence, who defied Trump for the first time ever.

Pg. 331ff:  When on Airforce One for the last time, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called Trump.  Trump was in no mood for small talk and told her he was leaving the Republican party.  “I’m done.  I’m starting my own party.  Over the next four days there was a tense standoff between Trump and the Republican National Committee.  Trump was told that the RNC would immediately stop paying his legal bills incurred during post-election challenges.  They also threatened to withdraw his access to the email addresses of forty million Trump supporters.  It’s a list Trump had used to generate money by renting it to candidates at a steep cost.  The list generated so much money that party officials estimated that it was worth about $100 million.  The list was jointly owned by the RNC and the Trump Campaign.  Trump then backed down.