ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl's new book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” shares the news that should surprise no one, via ABC.com:
In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party -- and that he didn't care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
[...] Trump's attitude was that if he had lost, he wanted everybody around him to lose as well, Karl writes. According to a source who witnessed the conversation, Trump was talking as if he viewed the destruction of the Republican Party as a punishment to those party leaders who had betrayed him -- including those few who voted to impeach him and the much larger group he believed didn't fight hard enough to overturn the election in his favor.
The Biggest Loser only backed down when Ronna Romney McDaniel threatened to stop paying his legal bills -- and take away his email list. They know where to hit him, right? Trump has got to be living off those email donations:
According to the book, "McDaniel and her leadership team made it clear that if Trump left, the party would immediately stop paying legal bills incurred during post-election challenges."
"But, more significant, the RNC threatened to render Trump's most valuable political asset worthless," Karl writes, referring to "the campaign's list of 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," says the book. "The list generated so much money that party officials estimated that it was worth about $100 million."
In addition to bragging about crowd size, Trump seems to have seized on a new conspiracy theory brought to him by Jeffrey Clark:
In late December, Trump turned to Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer with no experience in election law, but who promised to declare without evidence that there was widespread voter fraud and to pressure contested states to reverse President Biden's victory.
Clark also brought a new conspiracy theory to the cocktail of falsehoods. Two sources familiar with Clark’s actions said Trump “believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia. The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”
Desperate Loser acts like desperate loser? That ought to sell a lot of books, right?
