Former President Donald Trump still hasn’t conceded the election he lost to Joe Biden in both the electoral and popular vote over eight months ago. On Wednesday morning, the twice-impeached one-term president issued a couple of statements denying his loss, saying that the presidential race was rigged. We’ve all heard Donald Trump Jr.’s response to his father’s loss. Still, we haven’t heard as much from Eric Trump until now via an excerpt from Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s new book “‘I Alone Can Fix It’: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” that the Post published Tuesday.
Eric is usually quieter than Junior, but apparently, they share something in common: denying reality. The excerpt is pretty wild, to say the least.
“Eric Trump, who the night before had predicted to friends that his father would win with 322 electoral college votes, flipped out in the Map Room,” the excerpt reads.
“The election is being stolen,” the president’s 36-year-old son said. “Where are these votes coming from? How is this legit?”
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“He yelled at the campaign’s data analysts, as if it were their fault that his father’s early leads over Biden were shrinking. ”We pay you to do this,” he said. “How can this be happening?” the excerpt continues. “Eric Trump, through a spokesperson, insisted that he did not berate campaign staff, as described by witnesses.”
“Donald Trump Jr. said, “There’s no way we lose to this guy,” referring to Biden,” according to the book.
Donald Trump didn’t take the news of his defeat well at all. He still doesn’t to this day.
“We were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said,” according to the book. ‘He added, “Literally, we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good.”’
“Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good,” the report continues. “Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this f—— guy,” Trump told aides.”
“Stepien explained to Trump that in many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, would be added to the tally later as those ballots were processed,” the excerpt adds. “This meant that the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins.”
Maybe, and just stay with me here for a second, someone should have explained to Trump how all of this works before Election Day. At any rate, someone should do a wellness check on Eric to see if he’s OK.
You can read the full excerpt here.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
