On Monday, New York Magazine published an excerpt of “Landslide”, the third insider book about the Trump president from Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff. Here’s a few for the lowlight reel:
Trump on his fanbase: “The president often expressed puzzlement over who these people were with their low-rent ‘trailer camp’ bearing and their ‘get-ups,’ once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about ‘the great unwashed’… The fan base had always been peculiar to him. For most politicians, vox populi is a pretty remote concept, one brought home only with polling, press, and elections. Trump’s regular and, during some periods, nearly constant performances at stadium rallies gave him a greater direct route and connection to his base than any politician in the modern television age. It was adulation on a par with that of a pop star – a massive pop star. Stars like him needed fans, but this did not mean that a fan was not a strange thing to be. The more devoted the fan, the odder the fan. Like any megastar, Trump saw his fans from a far distance out. Certainly, there was no personal connection. A star could not assume responsibility for his fans, could he?”
About the inchoate Parler deal: “Trump representatives, working with Trump-family members, had approached Parler, the social network backed by Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, far-right exponents and large Trump contributors. They had floated a proposition that Trump, after he left office, become an active member of Parler, moving much of his social-media activity there from Twitter. In return, Trump would receive 40 percent of Parler’s gross revenues and the service would ban anyone who spoke negatively about him. Parler was balking only at this last condition.”
On January 6th: “‘It wasn’t until later in the three o’clock hour that Trump seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election – defending him so he would defend them – to seeing them as ‘not our people.’ Therefore, he bore no responsibility for them.'”