His forge as a billionaire businessman and populist leader is that of a braggart and ambitious young man who grew up in the underworld of dirty business and political corruption in the New York of the seventies and eighties; his behavior at the head of any human group, including his White House team, that of a capricious big boy who tends to turn the most fleeting and crazy occurrences into an executive decision. These are some of the features of Donald Trump's profile that the New York Times journalist traces in her book Confidence Man, launched this Tuesday in the United States.
With the subtitle of The creation of Donald Trump and the breakup of the United States, the extensive essay of 608 pages enriches the public portrait of the former president, sometimes with stories that underpin what is already known but also with new ones that we could not imagine. This is the case of the impulse that the president felt when he was about to fire her own daughter from the advisory position in which he had shamelessly placed her, side by side with her son-in-law Jared Kushner.
According to Haberman, the then president was going to publish a tweet with the announcement that Ivanka and her husband would resign from their positions. It was during a meeting with Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House Counsel Don McGahn. Kelly stopped the president's feet and advised him that before sending the message he talk to his daughter and his son-in-law... Which he didn't do.
Trump quickly denied, at a rally in Warren, Michigan, and through his network, Truth Social, both this account of being tempted to put his daughter and Kushner on the streets and many other revelations in Haberman's book. “Pure fiction. It never crossed my mind,” he said of the plan to fire Ivanka. Who to believe, taking into account the long history of lies of the former president and the impeccable career of the author, who also won a Pulitzer jointly with other Washington journalists for her coverage of the Trump Administration?
Haberman also reveals the "fear of dying" that the ruler felt when he suffered from the coronavirus, in October 2019, and how after being treated for the disease, he presented the idea of emerging in a wheelchair from the Walter Reed military hospital to, of soon, stand up, rip off his buttons, and show up dressed as Superman. Someone managed to dissuade him.
The childish but angry ruler of the United States used to tear up official documents that did not suit him. And this has been known since former White House official Solomon Lartey, a records analyst with a 30-year career, decided to tell how he had spent the first months of the Trump administration putting it back together, using kilos of duct tape and tons of patience. , the remains of the papers that the big boss had torn up. What we didn't know, until Haberman recounted it in his book, is that Trump also used to cause huge clogs in his toilet by dumping documents into it that he didn't want kept.
Other files, including hundreds of texts with state secrets, he preferred to take illegally to his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. And on this matter it has just emerged that earlier this year one of his lawyers, Alex Cannon, refused to obey Trump's request to tell the National Archives institution that he had already returned "all" the material that had been taken from the White House. The lawyer replied to his boss that he was not sure that this was the case and that he did not feel comfortable saying so. Then, in the summer, the notorious FBI search at Mar-a-Lago showed that there were indeed papers left, including more than 100 marked confidential, secret, or “top secret”; some with information about another country's nuclear weapons or about operations whose disclosure would endanger US spies.
The concealment of these papers constitutes a crime of obstruction of justice, according to the US Attorney's Office. It has pointed out in different writings. But until yesterday this accusation could only be clearly directed against the two lawyers for former president Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb who lied about it in writing and orally. Alex Cannon's testimony may make it easier for the prosecution to target Trump. That is if the Justice Department ever decides to press charges against him.
Meanwhile, Trump announced on Monday the filing of a defamation lawsuit against CNN, from which he asks for compensation of 475 million dollars in relation to information or comments in which analysts of this network would have accused him of being racist and compared him to Adolf Hitler. .
The former president, himself the author of a book called How to Get Rich, included the lawsuit announcement in a massive fundraising email asking for contributions starting at $5: “I am suing the Corrupt News Network ( CNN in its acronym in English) for slandering me. Remember, when they come for ME, they really come for YOU,” Trump wrote.
