A recently released book about former President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House includes some real eye-popping material.
According to “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” former First Lady Melania Trump was worried her husband was not taking the coronavirus seriously enough. The book was written by the New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and his wife, Susan Glasser, who is a writer with The New Yorker.
“‘You’re blowing this,’ she recalled telling her husband,” the authors wrote. “‘This is serious. It’s going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you’re taking it.'”
“You worry too much,” Melania recalled Trump telling her, according to the book, which claims Trump pretty much ignored his wife on the subject.
During one of the two interviews the authors conducted with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, Trump declared “it would be totally inappropriate” to pick Mike Pence as his vice president if he runs for reelection.
The most stunning revelation in the book is an alleged offer by Trump to give Jordan’s King Abdullah II control of the West Bank.
“I thought I was having a heart attack,” Abdullah II recalled to an American friend in 2018, according to Baker and Glasser’s book. “I couldn’t breathe. I was bent doubled-over.”
The book fluctuates between the important and the mundane. For instance, they describe how Trump deferred to Russian President Vladimir Putin to the point of saying he would believe Putin before believing the CIA.
Baker and Glasser also drop bread crumbs such as nicknames given to staffers like Jared Kushner (“the Slim Reaper”) and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (“Nurse Ratched”).
Regular dollops of gossip are served throughout. For example, one passage revealed Trump’s senior counselor, Kellyanne Conway, was not well-liked by other administration members. “While Priebus, Bannon and Kushner disliked each other, the one thing they agreed on was they all loathed [Kellyanne] Conway,” the authors related.
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