Is Donald Trump Tired Of Winning? Ask Jonathan Karl

0:04Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. you know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

0:38Anyways, let's get to it.

0:48Retribution and revenge, two words that define Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. Jonathan Carl is a Washington veteran, and he joins me to discuss his new book, Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the end of the grand old party. How has Trump changed since 2015? Where does he stand politically now? What would a Trump 2.0 really look like? And how much time do we have to save the Republican Party and America? Let's see what Jonathan has to say on today's show.

1:27Joining us now on Open Book is Jonathan Karl. He's a bestselling author, but he's also an amazing television host. He's the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News. And here's the book, Tired of Winning, which I read the book. I read your other book too. Your other book was a little bit more painful because unfortunately I was in the other book. This book is a lot less painful for me, John. But first of all, thank you so much for joining us. Before I get into the book, I'm dying to ask you a question, which I've actually been dying to ask you for like the last six or seven years. Okay. So you're ready?

2:01Yep. I'm ready. The first question that I purposefully asked the CNN correspondent, the first question in the Brady press room. So the afternoon that I got my job and Priebus was trying to stop me from getting it, Bannon was stabbing me in the back all night. Sean Spicer resigned from his job in protest. But I went to CNN first because they had not been called on in about three months. You may recall that. So purposefully, I did that. My second question was to you. Do you remember what you asked me? Yeah. I think I asked you about something horrible you had said about Trump. Yes, exactly. Sorry.

2:39I mean, I was just - Fantastic. This is why this is a great podcast. So you proceeded to list the things that I said about him. I said he was the president of the Queens Bully Association. I had some great lines that when I was zipping Trump working for Bush. And don't worry, this is an audio podcast, so nobody can see the shade of red that you're going, Jonathan Karl. So that's fine. But you were ripping into me at the podium and I'm a big boy, so I took it and I tried to flip it and spin minute. I think you thanked me for reminding everybody of the thing. I did. I said, I'm glad you got that out there because rather than having to hear that every day in the office, of course, I didn't realize I was only going to stay for 11 days, but we got it out of the way.

3:24But the question I'm dying to ask you, because you've been around Washington and journalism a long time and you know the nature of the people, it wasn't just me. There was a very large group of people, Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Kellyanne Conway. We could find tapes of, I would say, 50 people that worked in the Trump administration that said nasty things about Donald Trump prior to working in the administration. And then yet all of them went into the administration. Some of them came out of the administration not saying anything, but a lot of them returned to the nastiness, myself included. And so I want to ask you this before we get into your book.

4:04Why did it manifest like that? What is it about human nature, behavior in Washington? What is it about guys like Kevin McCarthy who absolutely hated Donald Trump and could have put them away lights out on January 7th of 2021, but feared him? And now because of his lack of backbone, he lost the speakership and he wasn't able to corral his troops. So you tell me, what is it about people? And by the way, it doesn't reflect well on me, right? Because I had an opinion of him. And I said, okay, I sucked it up and team player went to go work for him, but it was the wrong thing for many of us to do. Why do you think people do that?

4:38Well, I think there are a variety of reasons. And this is what I'm about to say, probably does not apply to you. I'm rather certain it wouldn't, but I think that for a lot of people, the ones that work for him and the ones who totally flipped when they did is there was something about getting inside his orbit and the way he, you know, Trump is a guy that can make you feel like you are the king of the world in one moment, in the very next moment, make you feel like you are crap and nothing and worse than nothing, less than nothing. But that he does undoubtedly have that magnetism. And with the elected officials, I've seen it where they appear at a public event with Trump, they appear at a rally with Trump, and they've never seen a crowd like that before.

5:21As riled up and as fired up and as responsive to what they're saying when they're saying something in praise of the dear leader. And I, you know, I saw that over and over again. I mean, I saw, you know, Chuck Grassley, for God's sake, at a rally, you remember there was like a brief, like five minutes where it looked like Grassley was going to have a potentially a tough reelection, a race in 2022. And Trump goes out to Sioux City, not Sioux Falls, by the way, Sioux City. And, you know, there's Grassley and Grassley's been Senator, you know, for, you know, for a half century. For viewers that don't know who John is talking about, he's George Washington's grandfather.

5:58He's 700 years old and he's been in the Senate for like 800 of the 700 years, right? We both know that. He's like, I mean, the guy's a farmer and he's been elected over and over and over and over and over again. And he makes Joe Biden look like a young man. But for him to walk out on that stage with Trump. I mean, and Grassley's not a Trump guy at all. Right. But there it is. And suddenly he's raising the - I have my own view. I think that for me, and by the way, my wife hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. So that's a very high standard of hatred. Wow. That is something, man. That is something.

6:39It almost got me divorced. But I did it for ego-based reasons, ultimately. If I'm being honest, again, it doesn't reflect well on me. And I had this conversation with Robert Green, who was on our show about three months ago celebrating the 25th anniversary of the 48 Laws of Power. A lot of it's ego-based, unfortunately. And so we're here now. This is a great book, Tired of Winning. It picks up from where betrayal ended. And by the way, this would be a phenomenal miniseries. I don't know if that's something in the works or not, because both these books are, they read as political thrillers would read.

7:15You want to turn the page to the next page. Even though I know the story, you are providing insight that none of us actually saw even when we were on the ground. Did you think that Donald Trump would end up consuming this much of your time back when you were covering him? I mean, absolutely not. And remember, I had covered him when I was a New York Post reporter in the 1990s. You know, I mean, he was the kind of guy you could call on a slow news day, you know, and hey, what do you think of something? And you get some kind of a story. He was always willing to play ball, never really took him particularly serious, except as kind of, you know, an entertaining sideshow.

7:50So I certainly didn't think that. And then as I was covering his campaign, and I did the first network interview with him of the 2016 cycle. I did the interview actually in 2013, August of 2013, when he made a trip to Iowa and he spoke at the leader conference with, I think it was Vander Plaats and that whole crowd of evangelicals was not particularly well received. At that point, Ted Cruz seemed to be the guy. But I did an interview with him out there and I remember we We were trying to figure out, should we do the interview? And if we do, where do we put it in the show? And we ended up doing it for five minutes in the second half of the show.

8:29This is our Sunday show this week, and it was a slow August. I mean, I did not think that this was going to be anything like this. I mean, frankly, I didn't think he was going to end up at the White House. But then when I wrote Betrayal, I really felt that would be the last thing I would ever write about Donald Trump. There's so much to write. I mean, this is such a colorful story. There's a Greek tragedy in this story. Is America, and I mean the nation, is America a protagonist in this story? And what I mean by that is, are we tired of winning? Are we going to defeat Donald Trump in 2024? I mean, this is something I address in the book as I try to conclude after I tell the story of Trump's final weeks in office, because there was so much information that has come out and that I was able to learn beyond what I had done even in betrayal.

9:28You know, part of it, all the sworn testimony from the January 6th committee that had not seen light. I mean, still, this is the first time a lot of that stuff had seen light. But also there's what I call the dark days in Mar-a-Lago when I guess now we hear from Liz Cheney. Kevin wasn't, I mean, you know, Kevin was concerned that Trump wasn't even eating. But he was a depressed mess who found some solace in becoming an amateur DJ on the patio there at Mar-a-Lago. This did not seem like a guy that was in any way making a comeback. But the question is, why the appeal? Why did he come back? Is it real?

10:08I mean, I go through at some length how the Republican Party and Donald Trump himself have actually been doing nothing but losing since 2016. I mean, all the off-year elections, the midterm elections, the special elections, the runoff elections, where Republicans close to Trump either have just simply lost or wildly underperformed, and where Trump himself obviously lost in 2020 and didn't just lose the election, I mean, and the massive loss in the popular vote, which was much greater than the loss in the electoral college, but all those losses in court, all those losses in his efforts to try to get Congress to overturn the results, his failed attempt to get his vice president to do something, has failed to attempt to pressure local Republicans in Georgia and Arizona and Michigan and Pennsylvania to do something.

10:59I mean, this guy's, I mean, Anthony, I had a working title for this book when I first started working on it, which was The Biggest Loser. But then something really strange happened. He ends up becoming once again, the dominant figure in the Republican Party while I'm working on this book. And so that's the big question. Is America tired of this kind of winning? That's the question. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to figure it out myself. I mean, when I finished your book, I, you know, one of the things I take pride in on open book is I read the book that the author writes because it's important for me.

11:31This way I can have a real conversation with you. When I finished your book, I closed the book. The first thing that came to mind for me and correct me if I'm wrong, he's, he's actually Al Capone. And let me, let me explain why it feels like he's not going to get caught. If you remember the movie, The Untouchables, Mr. Capone was an untouchable. John Gotti, who I grew up with his kids out here on Long Island. I mean, I'm talking to you from the city, but they're all from Long Island. I know John Jr. The father was perceived to be Teflon Don. He was never going to be going to jail. He died in jail.

12:06And I guess my question to you, after reading the evidentiary information that you're providing in this book about the culpability of Donald Trump in so many different forms, and I just remind viewers and listeners, there are four grand jury indictments, 91 counts of accusations being made against him. And yes, there's 20 % of the people that still like him, but is the government going to bring him down in 2024? Or is this mystery that the media talks about that he is the true Teflon Don? I think that he, I think your 20%, by the way, is the key thing to focus on. There is about 20 % of the country.

12:49That might even be a generous number that is totally and completely with him. This is the shoot them on Fifth Avenue crowd. Yes, no question. Yeah, we agree. But there's a much bigger group that perhaps got completely sick of all things Donald Trump. And when he left, kind of stopped paying attention to him. And now we're back, we're approaching another election. And there's kind of a superficial, am I better off now than I was four years ago kind of feeling. And, you know, people think back to 2019, you know, Donald Trump was president, the world looked a lot more peaceful, inflation was low, the economy felt pretty good.

13:30And so I think a lot of it is like an appeal to that. And they haven't really paid any attention to, first of all, memories have faded of what happened in 2020 and early 2021. And people haven't focused on what the guy actually stands for, especially now, which I think is a darker Donald Trump than we saw even in the American carnage days. And even when you were at the White House, I think this is why I wrote the book. I mean, this is really why I wrote the book is I wanted to have a very concise and powerful statement and presentation of facts, including a lot of new reporting about what it was really like at the end that presidency and what it could be like now based on, you know, how he has evolved.

14:15And most importantly, the people that have fled him. So, you know, look, I think there's still, I'm one of the few people out there that still thinks there's a chance he could lose the Republican nomination. That may be a slimmer and slimmer chance as we get closer to Iowa, but I don't think that's impossible. And I don't think that there's a mass movement out there to, you know, to bring back Donald Trump to power. Okay. Another observation from your book. I feel like if Huey Long had a baby with Charles Lindbergh and the baby was born and adopted by Roy Cohn, that would be Donald Trump. Okay.

14:50So you have this manifestation of isolationist tendencies, manifestation of white supremacy. He is a descendant of the first America first movement. And then he has that sort of evilness that Roy had, which we all remember living here in New York, how treacherous Roy Cohn was. I guess my question, and this is an observation, did he make the Republican Party and remold it in his image, or was the clay already out there and they drew to him once he started spitting his invective? There are a lot of people that have made the argument that the clay was out there. Dana Milbank wrote a whole book about this, looking at the Republican Party laying the groundwork for Trumpism and spending a lot of time in the Gingrich era, etc., etc.

15:40And there are some arguments there. I just think it's different. I think that Donald Trump is not in any way a conventional conservative Republican or what they used to call the movement conservatives. Um, he is all about himself. Um, when he's talking about retribution and he's talking about take making a war on the deep state, he's talking about making war on people that he views as his enemies, his personal enemies. As you know, in the book, I spend a lot of time talking about the imagery of Waco, Texas as the first, as the location of the first campaign rally and the language, much of it, I think Bannon, um, inspired of, of, of talking about, you know, rooting out and utterly destroying the people within our government that are our enemies, our domestic enemies, the people that are out to get us, the ordinary citizens.

16:29This is all the language of the militia movement that we saw in the 1990s that inspired Timothy McVeigh to load up a U-Haul truck full of fertilizer and to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. And he did that largely because of the federal overreach that we saw result in 80 plus people dying in Waco, Texas. And here Donald Trump is echoing the same language, except now the complaint isn't that the federal authorities vastly screwed up when they went after the Branch Davidians, which they did. It's that the federal authorities are coming after classified documents that I pilfered from the White House, that I'm being prosecuted for paying off a porn star.

17:15I mean, It's all him. These are not real grievances. But it makes you wonder though, right, John? I mean, you've been doing this again a long time. You've traveled the country covering campaigns. You interview people from many different states, lots of swing states. What happened to the country? You know, my observation was that, and again, it doesn't reflect well on me because I blew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, but I feel that I was in an aspirational blue-collar neighborhood. My parents thought their kids were going to go to college and live the American dream. When I traveled with Mr.

17:47Trump before he was president, so we'll call him Mr. Trump to date it, 71 campaign stops with the Trump plane in and out of places, Rust Belt states, swing states. These people felt economically desperational. They felt like the establishment had left them out. Oh, yeah. And so now a result of which he's their last best hope, I guess. Why can't the establishment see that? Why isn't the estate? These are people, John, that voted for Lyndon Johnson or their grandparents or great grandparents voted for FDR. Why is it that neither party, whether it's my old party, the Republican Party before this reconfiguration or the Democrats are not getting what Trump is laying down, which is so obvious now after seven years of observing it?

18:34Yeah. And when I say the grievances aren't real, I'm talking about the deep state being out to get you and they're trying to like, you know, I know that I'm talking about that stuff. But in terms of there are a hell of a lot of people out there who feel left behind or betrayed by the political system, by Democrats and by Republicans. And yes, these are, you know, the people that voted Democratic. These are the these are the Democrats that voted for Reagan in 1980. These are people who look at the vast creation of wealth and look at their own lives and see that it's entirely passed them by. And they also see themselves talked down to by elites.

19:12They see, and a lot of it plays into the culture stuff, of course, poor or middle class whites who get blamed for all order of things and told that they are privileged because of their race. and so it was a it was very fertile ground for trump to tap into and when you were on the plane with him going around in 2016 i mean i think that a big part of the appeal there was the image that trump had successfully created for himself by the way before he got into politics long before he got into politics which i'm the guy i mean i'm like the biggest the richest the best i like i've developed the best thing they're the greatest the you know and i i'm gonna i'm gonna do it for you now i'm gonna do it for the country um i'm gonna bring in the greatest minds i'm gonna bring in the Anthony Scaramucci's.

19:59I'm going to bring in the top, the ruthless negotiators from Wall Street, and I'm going to have them negotiate for our country. I mean, there was never much to it in reality, but the appeal to it was obvious. And then when Republicans finally got around to kind of criticizing him and taking him on in that primary, for too long, they tried to ignore him because they thought he would disappear. One of the first attacks from Marco was, a fraud as a business guy. He's not really successful. And Republican voters are like, wait, you mean the guy that's given helicopter rides at the Iowa State Fair?

20:34You mean the guy that just arrived on his own jet that says Trump on it? And you, Marco, who's struggling to pay off your college debt, you're saying this guy's not successful? It didn't land. And that was the appeal. But that's a very different message than what he's saying now. Don't you think? I do. I mean, this is the thing I don't understand. Like, you know, I'm obviously friends with Governor Christie. I know he worked at ABC for a while. I've supported Governor Christie, full disclosure. I've given money to the PAC, given money to the campaign. I don't know why Chris doesn't say, hey, I understand why he's appealing to you.

21:10However, I would like to offer you a different alternative. It's my job to have you not unselect Trump, but to put me in the number one position versus him. He's not doing that. He's bashing Trump all day. And when you bash Trump to that 15 % of the people, they feel like you're bashing them. You see what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that's a mistake Chris is making, but that's the campaign that he wants to run. You are saying something else, which I find super fascinating. And I want you to explain this to our viewers and listeners. You say that Trump is undercovered. And I actually think it's true.

21:46He has the smallest campaign staff of any frontrunner in history, yet he's still dominant. Tell us what you mean by that statement and why it matters. After he left the White House, first of all, he's off Twitter. Fox, for a long period, seemed to almost pretend like he didn't exist. He certainly wasn't being interviewed. The way he was covered in much of the rest of the, I mean, I hate to talk about the media as one big monolith, but by many news organizations, was it first to cover the impeachment trial, which was not covering him per se. It was covering the prosecution of what he had done and his culpability for January 6th.

22:27Go forward into the following year and there's coverage of the formation of the January 6th committee, the January 6th committee's hearings, and then eventually the criminal prosecutions. These things get covered a lot. I'm not saying that there's not coverage of that. But what there's been very little coverage of, I think until recently, and hopefully my book has helped spur some of this, is what's the guy actually been doing since he left the White House? Who's around him anymore? And what are they talking about? What would he actually be like if he came back to the White House? No, there's coverage of the civil case against his business.

23:07Again, today he was there sitting in court. What's Jack Smith's latest thing. So that's why I tried to dive into the guy's mindset. And what I found was a deeply paranoid and conspiracy-minded individual who looked nothing like a former president or a potential future president, looked like somebody that was stuck in this world of the far fringe, believing some of the most wacky conspiracy theories and surrounded by almost entirely people that are total sycophants who are there just to tell them how great he is. See, it's interesting because I know a lot of the people on his campaign. I get an interest in your reaction.

23:53It's a small group, but there's some talented people in his campaign. There are. Yeah, there are. And that scares me, by the way, because it's not just sycophants. These are deep state, de-layering the administrative state, expansion of executive power, but effective and smart people. You know, these are like less crazy people than Bannon, but equally targeted, if that makes any sense. It's fascinating. You have kind of two groups of people. You have the people that I just described, the kind of like way out there, you know, veterans of OAN, you know, One American news. And by the way, Bannon as well.

24:33Bannon's not actually on the campaign, but Bannon, I think, is very much an influence, maybe even more important than he was going into 2016 and 2017, because it's Bannon's agenda. It really is, insofar as there is an agenda besides, I want to go and kill all my enemies. But then you have this very small group of operatives, and you know who they are. It's people like Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Brian Jack, Jason Miller. And by the way, that's kind of it. I mean, it's a really small group. But they're talented, John. You and I both know those people. They are absolutely talented. And you know their effect.

25:13And it's a smaller group than was around them even in 2016, which was a very small campaign. But, and by the way, there's one strength they have over 2016, and that is they aren't trying to kill each other. There's no infighting that you hear of coming out of the, I mean, they are on the agenda, they're doing their things, and they've already been methodically going through trying to game out the primary system, trying to influence the rules in each of the primary states to Trump's benefit. They've done this in Nevada where you have this weird system where there's going to be a caucus that's actually going to award the delegates and a primary where people are going to vote.

25:49All the states that are becoming winner take all because Trump knows, they know, they believe Trump can get 35, 40 percent and come in first place. And they don't want anybody else getting pieces of delegates for coming in second or third. So, yes, they are. But, you know, these are not actually the people that Trump is spending most of his day with. Actually, there's another factor, and I'd like your thoughts on this too, but this was something that was pointed out to me by somebody who was there then and is not on the campaign now, but is still in that orbit and still very sympathetic to, you know, very much on the Trump team, pointing out that, you know, he never really, he didn't play much golf in 2016.