A bombshell new tell-all book is exposing just how disastrous Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has been behind closed doors — including a frantic phone call the scandal-plagued ex-president personally made to a political fixer in a desperate effort to get his proverbial house back in order, just shortly after his eldest son Don Jr. laid claim to a powerful position within his father’s 2nd bid for reelection.
According to political correspondent Meredith McGraw, Donald Trump made a frantic phone call to conservative consultant Susie Wiles in March 2022, right around the time he and his son were attempting to launch a furious revenge campaign against several anti-Trump Republicans, including former Wyoming House Rep. Liz Cheney, who helped lead the charge against the ex-president for his role in the violent, deadly January 6th Capitol insurrection.
Vanity Fair published excerpts of McGraw’s upcoming book, Trump In Exile, in which the Washington Post reporter exposes the chaos that was eating away at Donald’s re-election campaign, as his eldest daughter Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner gravely distanced themselves from her father’s tumultuous campaign.
McGraw writes that it was a “strange and empty time” for Trump and his Mar-a-Lago resort and post-White House home, as the luxury property had plummeted in popularity and social status in the midst of a global pandemic and in the wake of the owner’s attempt at a government coup.
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In February of 2022, political advisors met to discuss political endorsements, as well as the Republicans they would soon be targeting, as Trump was “hell-bent” on exacting revenge, according to McGraw.
“Being associated with someone who inspired a bloody attack on the Capitol didn’t have the same social clout as being associated with a president,” she writes.
“The meeting was held in the empty tea room at Mar-a-Lago, a dining room just off the main living room…There was no set agenda. No one was in charge.”
By the time the meeting was done, McGraw says, everyone walked away with the sense that Junior was now in a much larger, much more important role than he was when the meeting began.
“Trump Jr. looked forward to disappearing into the wilderness of Pennsylvania to hunt deer and was eager to make his own mark on the MAGA movement,” she writes.
In that same meeting, Trump and his people formally set their sights on their official new target — Liz Cheney.
“For the next year, it would be an all-hands-on-deck effort to identify and elevate a competitive candidate that could take down Cheney, the one Republican who dared to stand up against Trump and challenge the former president on January 6 and his falsehoods about the 2020 election,” writes McGraw. “Trump’s political fate, they believed, rested on taking Cheney down.”
As we all know, Cheney would eventually lose the Republican primary to her Trump-endorsed opponent, Harriet Hageman in August 2022.
However, it wasn’t without the help of the political “fixer” Trump called in to clean up his mess: Susie Wiles.
In that March 2022 call, Trump reportedly told Wiles, “It’s a f—ing mess. I don’t know who’s in charge. I don’t know how much money I have. I don’t know if they’re stealing from me. I don’t know who’s who. I need you to fix it.”
Wiles had worked for Trump a couple of times in the past, but considered herself far from a bona fide Trump insider, leaving her a bit surprised to receive a desperate phone call from the ex-president, pleading for just a “couple weeks of her time,” according to McGraw.
“Except that getting Trump’s current operation in line, from fundraising to personnel, didn’t take two weeks—it took around two months,” McGraw goes on to explain.
“Wiles—much to the relief of Trump’s family, who viewed her as trustworthy, and his longtime aides, who were happy to see an adult in the room—was now in charge.”
You can find the full piece with excepts of McGraw’s book from Vanity Fair here.
Featured image via Flickr/Trump White House Archives
