In Another Trump Book, A Journalist’s Belated Awareness

Veteran Beltway journalist Jonathan Karl should not have been so easily startled, given his terrific resume. In his author bio, “Karl has covered every major event in Washington, DC, including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department, reporting under four presidents and 14 press secretaries from the White House.” Until recently, he was ABC News’ chief White House correspondent—a perch that set him up, as he put it in the title of his previous book. “Front Row On The Trump Show.”

Yet in his new book, Betrayal: The Last Act of the Trump Show, Karl appears as an almost touchingly candid and kind person who was repeatedly stunned by what he saw in the last year of the Trump administration. With the unfortunate timing of airing in March 2020, before the implications of the Trump administration were fully revealed, “Front Row” began with serious praise of “objectivity and balance” and a complaint that “Donald was featured in the mainstream media.” Trump is relentlessly and broadly negative.” Just a year and a half later, after 750,000 American Covid deaths and the attack on the Capitol, Karl admits that the “Trump show” may actually be more sinister than mere theatre.

“I have never renounced my belief that journalists are not an opposition party and should not behave like us,” Karl writes in his “Betrayal.” “But the first obligation of a journalist is to follow the truth and truth. And the simple truth about the last year of the Trump presidency is that his lies have become deadly and shaken the foundations of our democracy.”

“Betrayal” is presented as an inside look at what happened in the final months of the Trump White House, starting February 10, 2020. At the time, news of a new coronavirus in China was leaking to the United States, but Johnny McEntee, a 29-year-old former college quarterback who transitioned from serving in the White House, carrying the bags of President Trump, to becoming the director of the Presidential Staff Office. seemed more immediately threatened by the appointees across the federal government responsible for hiring and firing more than 4,000 politicians. ”

McEntee saw it as his duty to purge from the executive branch anyone deemed unfaithful to the president; Less than a year later, on January 1, McEntee would send a text message to Mike Pence’s chief of staff, insisting that the vice president had the authority to overturn the results of the November election. He pointed to an episode that featured Thomas Jefferson as an example.

The full (and absurd) text of the memo is one of several that Karl presented in this book, and another memo from McEntee’s office, sent less than a month before the election, outlining why Secretary of Defense Mark Esper should be fired. (Esper’s alleged violations include the department’s focus on Russia and “actively pushing for ‘diversity and inclusion’.”) He responded by threatening to give away the valuable email list of his 40 million supporters for free – “Trump’s hiring money. It makes it virtually impossible for him to win.”

McDaniel and Trump have since denied such standoff—Trump even denied it to Karl’s face in one of his recent interviews for “Betrayal.” During the same interview, Trump recalled his speech on January 6, 2021, shortly before the Capitol attack, and described it as “a very good time with extremely caring and friendly people.” Karl was horrified, at least inside. “I was surprised how fondly he remembered a day that I will always remember as one of the darkest days I have witnessed,” he writes, adding that Trump justified his death threats against his own vice president. “It confused me,” says Karl.

He did? The author’s expressions of surprise are so frequent and exaggerated that they are perhaps the most surprising part of this book. “Betrayal” is less insightful about the Trump White House and more revealing Karl’s gradual, overdue awareness that something could really go wrong in the White House. Things seem “crazy”, “crazy”, “crazy” to him. He delves into bizarre conspiracy theories about the presidential election and seriously explains why each one is wrong. He conducts a series of recorded interviews with Trumpworld insiders – nearly all of whom he insists are bravely telling the president some very hard truths in private, even if they’re publicly siding with Trump.

Karl remembers September 10, 2020, as a turning point for himself: the day he asked “the strongest confrontational question I’ve ever asked a president or any other political leader”. At this point, Trump had downplayed the pandemic for half a year, insisting that the coronavirus “affects almost no one.” “Sinan” when he heard other reporters use the word “lie” until then, Karl was sitting in the front row at a briefing and moved to put pressure on Trump: “Why did you lie to the American people and why did you lie? Why should we trust anything you say now? ?”

It was a good question, although this, as with many exchanges of opinions during briefings, turned into more Trump theatrics as the president frowned and called Karl “a disgrace for the ABC television network”. You’re also wondering how Karl, who mentioned in his previous book that George W. Bush had brought the country to war with Iraq on false pretensions, covered politics for two decades before asking anything so “forcedly confrontational”. “Front Row” contains a speech in which Karl informs Trump that it is perhaps dangerous to call the press “enemy of the people”: “I said, ‘Some sick people might take your words seriously.’ ‘I hope people take my words seriously,’ he said, missing the point when I warned of possible violence against journalists.

Or perhaps it wasn’t Trump who missed the point of this trade-off – something that Karl didn’t seem to have thought of was apparently so entrenched in his founding assumptions that until very recently he viewed some troubling possibilities as simply incomprehensible. More than a year before the 2020 election, Karl asked Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, what would happen if Trump lost and refused to make concessions. Kelly was confident Trump would leave—and if he “tryed to chain himself to the Oval Office desk”, “they would cut the chains and get him out.”

Karl remembers being impressed by Kelly’s confident authoritarian demeanor. “I didn’t ask any more questions, but I still had a few questions,” he writes—an awkward confession for a major network’s Washington chief reporter. “The scenario described by John Kelly seemed too disturbing and too absurd to think about any further. I tried not to think about it again.”

The Trump era has exposed vulnerabilities and blind spots, punching a hole in all manner of institutional norms and assumptions. It probably points to Karl’s upbringing as a person he doesn’t want to think about such a terrible thing, but despite all the high-minded talk about his pursuit of journalistic accuracy in his books, it gives little indication that he has the imagination to handle it. actually.