Frankly, we’re all well aware of how very fragile Donald Trump’s ego is. And to be quite honest, once he catches wind of this particular news, I genuinely doubt his pride will ever fully recover.
According to a rather interesting story included in Jeremy Peters’ new book Insurgency, longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon apparently isn’t quite the big fan of the ex-president than we’ve always believed. In fact, it seems Bannon wasn’t impressed by Donald Trump’s presidency at all — so much so that he once compared the one-term, twice-impeached former guy to Adolf Hitler and theorized that Trump will ultimately go down in history among the three worst president’s this country has ever seen.
According to Steve Bannon, who certainly knows Trump quite well, the former reality TV washup and real estate “mogul” never actually wanted to be the President of the United States.
This story detailed by Peters reveals that a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s murder was the turning point for Bannon, when he finally came to realize that Donald Trump only really wanted to be the president when it was fun and convenient.
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Peters writes, “But Trump’s inattentiveness to the pandemic alarmed Bannon. And his response to George Floyd’s death had him increasingly convinced that Trump had lost his mind. He complained to colleagues that Trump didn’t seem interested in his job.”
Bannon allegedly claimed, “Being president and doing the job of president are two different things. He doesn’t want to do the job of president of the United States.”
It was then that Bannon knew Donald Trump would never rise to the historical acclaim seen for the likes of Abraham Lincoln or President Roosevelt.
Peters’ book reads:
Instead, Bannon said, Trump would end up going down in history as one of the two or three worst presidents ever: ‘It’ll be James Buchanan, Donald Trump, and Millard Fillmore.’ Having run Trump’s successful underdog bid four years earlier during its final weeks, Bannon was openly critical of how the new team was running the reelection campaign. ‘Trump did not win in 2016. That’s the one thing they never embraced and understood. Hillary Clinton lost. Trump did not win,’ he said.”
It seems Steve often found himself frustrated and annoyed as Trump’s aides coddled him with fake poll numbers just to keep his mouth shut and his mood happy.
“It’s like showing Hitler fake armor divisions when the Reichstag is burning down,” Bannon reportedly fumed, and for once in my entire life, I agree with him. To be frank, Bannon is right. Numerous books, tell-alls, interviews, and revelations following Trump’s final day in office have all seemingly confirmed the same thing in one way or another — all of the people surrounding Trump in the White House were deeply desperate to just stave off Trump’s dramatic fits of rage from one day to the next, and they would do just about anything to accomplish that.
Peters writes, “They’d tell him he was improving in the Reno media market and with seniors in Phoenix. They’d tell him he’s up seventeen points with left-handed redheads in Pennsylvania.”
In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s brutal election loss to Joe Biden, and the subsequent year of unhinged conspiracy theories and lies we’ve seen him continue to tout, it quickly became clear that there was no scenario in which Trump would accept his defeat. There was no version of this where he went peacefully. There was no amount of evidence contrary to his claims that he would accept.
Now we know why.
When you’ve spent four long years in the most powerful position this country has to offer, surrounded by “Yes” men who constantly and consistently told you how much you were “winning” even when it was the farthest thing from the truth, it certainly makes sense now why Trump refused to believe that he’d lost — no matter what the votes, evidence, or lawsuits had to say.
You can find Peters’ new bombshell book for sale here.
Featured image via screen capture/Flickr – Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
