Author Alex Isenstadt and the Inside Story of Trump’s Power Grab

Speaker 1 Remember during the campaign when Donald Trump was on the state regime media known as Fox, and Sean Hannity said this to him, and this is how Donald Trump responded. Let's play it.

Speaker 1 Those that want people to believe that you want retribution, that you will use the system of justice to go after your political enemy.

Speaker 2 Number one, they're wrong. It has to stop because otherwise we're not going to have a country.
Look, when

Speaker 2 this election is over,

Speaker 2 based on what they've done, I would have every right to go after them.

Speaker 1 They're wrong, but after this election, I would have every right to go after them. So in the past two weeks, what's Trump done? Well, he's doing more than that, though.

Speaker 1 But he went to the Department of Justice building.

Speaker 1 And what did he say in the Department of Justice building? Here he talks about Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, his alphabet of grievances here. Let's play it.

Speaker 2 My administration stripped the security clearances of the disgraced intelligence agents who lied about Hunter Biden's laptop from hell.

Speaker 2 We revoked the clearances of Deranged Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and the crooked law firms that aided their partisan persecutions.

Speaker 1 Part of the thing he does too is he doesn't pronounce the names right, Letitia James. Then Mark Elias, he name checks and a bunch of other lawyers who he hates.
Here, play this clip.

Speaker 2 It's with the help help of radicals like Mark Elias, Mark Pomerance,

Speaker 2 and these are people that nobody's ever seen anything like it.

Speaker 2 So many others, but these are people that are bad people, really bad people. They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third.

Speaker 1 He's also issued a number of executive orders directly attacking law firms by name, attacking Perkins, Cooey, Paul Weiss, Covington and Burling, like executive orders that say the name of the law firm on the executive order and basically tell people not to do business with the law firms as part of Donald Trump's revenge.

Speaker 1 But so if Donald Trump saying these are bad people, who are the good people for Donald Trump? Here he talks about the political prisoners and heroes who he's he's there to help. Let's play it.

Speaker 2 Please convict me. Don't say that.
I pardoned hundreds of political prisoners who had been grossly mistreated.

Speaker 2 We removed the senior FBI officials who misdirected resources to send SWAT teams after grandmothers and J-6 hostages. And it was a.

Speaker 1 So that's who he thinks are the good people. By the way, my theory also about why Donald Trump is also

Speaker 1 fixated on annexing Canada and attacking Canada, you know, a lot for a variety of reasons. But to me, I think it partly has to why he hates Trudeau.

Speaker 1 I think it partly has to do with this photo right here. And I could be wrong about that, but you know, he's such a person of personal grievance and revenge.

Speaker 1 And just here's what he said about Canada yesterday here, Play.

Speaker 2 Canada, and here's my problem with Canada. Canada was meant to be the 51st state because we subsidize Canada by $200 billion a year.
We don't need their cars. We don't need their lumber.

Speaker 2 We have a lot of lumber.

Speaker 1 Let's bring on Alex Eisenstadt, author of the new book, Revenge, the Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power. I know this, been working on this for over two years, and it truly is an inside story.

Speaker 1 You take readers inside Trump airplane that he calls Trump Force One. I don't want to give it the name that he called it.

Speaker 1 You bring people inside Mar-a-Lago and at these meetings where he's seething with anger, calling former President Biden the R word, calling this person fat and gross.

Speaker 1 And it just seems like if you're with Trump at an event, it's just him like mocking people and attacking people.

Speaker 1 Tell us about the book, why you wrote it, and give us some anecdotes that you can share. Sure.
So I titled the book Revenge because Revenge.

Speaker 1 was a centerpiece of his campaign and it was in many ways the goal of the campaign. It was the playbook.
And one of, there are a couple really important and interesting anecdotes regarding revenge.

Speaker 1 The notion of revenge.

Speaker 1 There was a point early on in the campaign, Trump gives a speech at CPAC, right? Where he says,

Speaker 1 we basically promises revenge.

Speaker 1 He says, I will be your retribution. And that was a line that Trump came up with behind the scenes.
And I tell this story where he's sitting there with his aides and he comes up with this line.

Speaker 1 And he and his team say, this line is perfect.

Speaker 1 before he gets on stage his team actually prints out gets ready a bunch of merch that was based on the retro the i will be your retribution line so it's ready to go as soon as trump says it and from that point on trump had a major central theme to his campaign let's let's move forward about eight months nine months after that speech maybe closer to a year joe biden gives his state of the union in 2024 and in that speech, Biden basically says that Trump is going to be bent on revenge.

Speaker 1 Trump is behind the scenes. He's back at Mar-a-Lago.
He's with his team. They're watching in the Mar-a-Lago library room.

Speaker 1 And he says to himself, he says to his team, there will be no revenge, wink, wink. And that tells you right there that Trump was.
being sarcastic about it, joking about it.

Speaker 1 He knew that revenge was a centerpiece of his campaign and it would be a centerpiece of his White House if he got elected.

Speaker 1 And that was a line where he would joke about revenge a lot of the time on the airplane, on his plane. He would talk about it.
Biden was making this essential part of his argument.

Speaker 1 And Trump would say, Look, yeah, he would joke about it. I'm not, I'm, there will be no revenge.
But there's actually another really interesting point in the book.

Speaker 1 And that is when

Speaker 1 Trump is in,

Speaker 1 he's in Washington, D.C., for his January 6th indictment hearing. He goes to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and he gives a press conference.

Speaker 1 As the press conference wraps up, a reporter from the Washington Post asks him, will you promise that there will be no violence if you lose the election? Trump walks away,

Speaker 1 doesn't answer the question. Unclear if he heard it, but regardless, he walks away.
The story blows up the fact that he didn't answer the question.

Speaker 1 So Trump at this point is on his way from Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 to Iowa, Iowa, where he's going to have a town hall event that night with Fox News.

Speaker 1 One of Trump's aides comes to him and tells him about the story, how it's blowing up, and says, look, you're going to get asked about this on Fox News. This is a story.
This is an issue.

Speaker 1 It's gaining traction. You're going to be asked about revenge.
And it was there that Trump and advisors knew that, at least for the time being, they had a bit of a political problem, right? And so

Speaker 1 they get to Iowa. They're sitting backstage before this event.
And

Speaker 1 what happens is there's a mole that the campaign has within Fox News. And this mole

Speaker 1 gets copies of the questions, screenshots them to the Trump campaign, which is with Trump backstage in a holding room.

Speaker 1 The team looks at the questions and they say, we just got the test questions, the questions to the test before the test even takes place.

Speaker 1 And so they go through the questions and they start sort of practicing what they're going to say, workshopping answers. And it was there that one of the questions indeed was about revenge.

Speaker 1 And it was there that Trump and his team come up with an answer. So Trump goes on stage.
He's asked the question

Speaker 1 verbatim as it appears on the list. and he comes up with his answer, which is, our revenge will be success.
And it's a line.

Speaker 1 If you go back and you watch that tape, you can see he said the line with confidence. He had it practiced.
He had it rehearsed. It's for a reason.
Trump was happy with that answer.

Speaker 1 He used it for the remainder of the campaign. In fact, the day after the IO event, he speaks with Ron McDaniel, who at that point was the Republican National Committee Chairwoman.

Speaker 1 And he says, did you see the answer I gave last night? He was happy with the answer. He kept on using it going forward.

Speaker 1 You know, it's also interesting because Trump always attacks his political opponents as getting the questions in advance and workshopping the answers.

Speaker 1 So there's always a lot of projection there as well.

Speaker 1 But, you know, it does seem, though, now, not seem, it does, it is, that the main thing that he's focused on appears to be revenge, seething revenge in the Oval Office.

Speaker 1 I've referred to it as this kind of almost like a... like a walk of shame where, you know, or humiliation ritual.
I mean, first having these these people kiss his ring at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 1 I want to get your take on that because people showing up at Mar-a-Lago, he'd make these executives and all the people who he thought gave him bad coverage show up at Mar-a-Lago, tell him how great he is, and kind of humiliate themselves.

Speaker 1 And you kind of see him doing that in the Oval Office where he'll bring people there and he'll have people sitting very uncomfortably and try to humiliate them in public.

Speaker 1 So that seems to be his focus. I mean, revenge is what he was running on.
And I mean, it's not success isn't his revenge. It seems revenge is his revenge.

Speaker 1 And he's not really focused on the other things. And I think that's what's pissing people off.
What do you make of what's happening right now? Yeah, no,

Speaker 1 he clearly wants retribution against the people who he feels wronged him. He's very focused on it.
And in fact, it actually became a strategy of his campaign.

Speaker 1 And it may have actually, in some ways, helped him electorally. He presented himself, I write in the book, as a vessel.
He became a vessel for a lot of people's frustrations.

Speaker 1 He cast himself as a victim of a deep state establishment, a system of elites that was out to get him, the same system of elites that he convinced a lot of people that were also out to get them.

Speaker 1 His supporters and a lot of people, some of whom actually in the past have voted Democrat, came to see him as a vessel. for their frustrations.

Speaker 1 And so revenge and the notion of revenge against elites was something that may have helped him electorally. It's something that may have helped him politically.

Speaker 1 He now gets into the White House and what we see is that his desire for revenge against any number of people, particularly I would say, the people who were involved in the January 6th investigations.

Speaker 1 One of the biggest things that Trump focused on during the campaign was January 6th and this idea of lawfare, this idea that there's a legal system that's out to get him.

Speaker 1 What you see him do over the last few weeks is a systematic purge of the DOJ and the FBI of people who were involved in the January 6th investigation.

Speaker 1 And then you go back to last week, last Friday, where Trump is having,

Speaker 1 where Trump goes to the DOJ, gives a speech

Speaker 1 about ending lawfare, essentially, which is in some ways a remarkable moment, right? It's unusual. Typically, a president in a White House keeps the DOJ at arm's length, right?

Speaker 1 The DOJ is considered an independent agency. But Trump sees himself as very interested and very involved and very invested in what happens in the DOJ and the FBI.

Speaker 1 And in fact, during the campaign, Trump gave perhaps the most thought when he was thinking about cabinet secretaries, when he was thinking about who might staff his administration.

Speaker 1 He was easily the most focused on the DOJ.

Speaker 1 And he seems to be most comfortable in this victim revenge modality.

Speaker 1 And so the moment you're seeing, I think, judges rule against his executive orders or issue injunctions, that's the, you know, that's where

Speaker 1 he's able to speak that language of kind of victimhood, revenge, grievance. They're coming after me.
This is unfair. Bad judges.

Speaker 1 What do you think about that? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And here's the thing, which is that he's been running against, if you think about it, he's been running against the judicial system now ever since January 6th, right?

Speaker 1 And you could make the, you could make the case that it helps him politically, right? I mean, or at least he's decided it's helped him politically.

Speaker 1 He's in some ways turned his supporters against the judicial system. Why? Because the judicial system is independent or it's supposed to be independent.

Speaker 1 And every time the judicial system tries to stop him, then then every time the judicial system tries to stop him, he can cast them as an organization as an agency or a group that is somehow that is somehow trying to stop him and what he's trying to do and therefore turn himself into a victim.

Speaker 1 I want everybody to get the book because it helps, I think, really give a

Speaker 1 background into what is driving him. I mean, you know, look, our coverage here is,

Speaker 1 you know, I think he's the greatest threat to my own views. I think he's the greatest threat to democracy, I think, ever.
And I think you have to study it.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think your book takes a good look into the pathology. I could go on and on with you and talk about the specific instances, but I want people to go get the book.

Speaker 1 So it's called Revenge, The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power. Alex, you're now at Axios and you're there, one of their lead reporters there.

Speaker 1 And at the time you were writing this, you were at Politico

Speaker 1 and love reading your stuff. And so thanks.
Thanks for being on. Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it. Everybody, hit subscribe.
Let's get to 5 million subscribers.

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