Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party - Hardcover

Karl, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593473981 ISBN 13: 9780593473986

Verlag: Dutton, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

One of 62 Books 'The Ezra Klein Show' Guests Recommended This Year, The New York Times

Featured in Vanity Fair’s Books to Read in November

One of the Associated Press' Most Anticipated Books of the Fall

"The most important thing that has been written to date about what is in front of the American people in the next presidential election." —Nicolle Wallace

An extraordinary view into the politics of our times, Tired of Winning explores how Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his own image—and the wreckage he’s left in his wake.

Packed with new reporting, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party tracks Trump’s improbable journey from disgraced and defeated former president to the dominant force, yet again, in the Republican Party.

From his exile in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump has become more extreme, vengeful, and divorced from reality than he was on January 6, 2021. His meddling damaged the GOP’s electoral prospects and his legal troubles were mounting. Yet he re-emerged as the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and the president-elect.

Jonathan Karl has known Donald Trump since his days as a New York Post reporter in the 1990s, and he covered every day of Trump’s administration as ABC News’s chief White House correspondent. No one is in a better position to detail the former president’s quest for retribution and provide a glimpse at what the GOP signed up for by once again choosing him as its standard bearer.

In 1964, Ronald Reagan told Americans it was “a time for choosing.” Sixty years later, Republicans have their own choice to make: Are they tired of winning?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal were instant New York Times bestsellers.

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CHAPTER ONE

"Come Retribution"

Twenty-five years before my first book about Donald Trump was published, I wrote a paperback entitled The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America's New Militias. My first book, written in the wake of Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, tracks the emerging anti-government movement that inspired McVeigh to make war on federal law enforcement agencies that he, and many other far-right activists, believed posed a threat both to America and to themselves.

On the cover of the book is a photograph of a building engulfed in flames-the Branch Davidians' Waco, Texas, compound called Mount Carmel. Federal law enforcement learned the group was stockpiling weapons and explosives and, after a disastrous fifty-one-day siege in early 1993, attempted to storm the compound. With agents closing in, several Branch Davidians set fire to the building, apparently preferring to die rather than be captured by authorities. The body of the cult's leader, David Koresh, was found with a gunshot to the head. Investigators concluded he was killed by one of his deputies.

The episode was widely considered a colossal failure by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), which coordinated the assault. To some, though, the debacle represented something far more sinister than a federal raid gone horribly wrong-they saw it as a deliberate plot by the FBI and the ATF to trap and murder the Branch Davidians.

The Right to Bear Arms tracks how the Waco siege became a rallying cry for a national movement of mostly right-wing activists who believed Washington, DC, was dangerously corrupt and out to get them. Forming what they called "citizens' militias," they stockpiled arms and ammunition as well as food and survival gear. Some of them played weekend war games, practicing makeshift military maneuvers in vacant parking lots, on farmland, or in remote woodlands. I interviewed members of these groups. I read their writings, listened to their talk shows on shortwave radio, and attended some of their meetings.

"The ranks of the militias are made up of factory workers, veterans, computer programmers, farmers, housewives, small-business owners," I wrote in the book's introduction. "The most shocking thing about these 'paramilitary extremists' is how normal they are. They are your neighbors. But in another sense, many members of America's new militias live in a parallel universe, where civil war is already being waged by tyrants within the federal government."

On the furthest fringes of this movement were individuals who wanted to take revenge on the federal agencies responsible for not only the siege in Waco but a host of other transgressions-both real and imagined. McVeigh, for example, cited the government's "increasingly militaristic and violent" actions as his rationale in a letter to Fox News correspondent Rita Cosby weeks before he was executed under the federal death penalty. In the letter, he argued that his bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City-at the time the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history-was "morally and strategically equivalent" to the US military striking government buildings in countries around the world.1

But McVeigh was an exception that proved the rule. For the most part, the members of these citizens' militias I encountered condemned the Oklahoma City bombing. They weren't terrorists; they were ordinary Americans who had grown increasingly paranoid. "Their mantra is self-defense," I wrote in 1995. "They have formed not to wage a campaign of terror but to defend themselves from a terror campaign they believe is already being waged by their own federal government."2

In the run-up to my book's publication, I planned a small party for friends and family at the Heartland Brewery in Manhattan and decided to spruce up the party invitation with some over-the-top words of praise from my friends and colleagues. A couple of my fellow reporters at the New York Post offered up some choice words, and on a whim, I decided to call a famous New Yorker who was both a reliable source and known for making hyperbolic statements to see if he would give me a quote as well. He readily agreed to provide a glowing endorsement of the book-provided I wrote it up myself. So I did:

"What a book! Karl is one of the best in the business-tough, fair and brutally honest."

-Donald J. Trump

Trump signed off on the quote. To this day, I don't know whether he actually read the advance copy of The Right to Bear Arms I sent him-but more than a quarter of a century later, he announced that the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign would be held in a familiar location: Waco, Texas.

Largely irrelevant in both the Republican primary and the general election, Texas was an odd choice for the campaign kickoff. A Trump spokesman would later deny the venue selection was at all related to the massacre that took place there almost exactly thirty years earlier-he claimed Waco was chosen solely because it was "centrally located" and "close" to big cities like Dallas and Houston3-but plenty of rally attendees drew the connection between the setting and Trump's central campaign message.

"[Trump's] making a statement, I believe, by coming to these stomping grounds where the government, the FBI, laid siege on this community just like they laid siege on Mar-a-Lago and went in and took his stuff," Charles Pace, a Branch Davidian pastor who knew Koresh but left the Mount Carmel compound several years before the deadly fire, told The Texas Tribune's Robert Downen. "He's not coming right out and saying, 'Well, I'm doing it because I want you to know what happened there was wrong.' But he implies it."4

Shortly after the rally was announced, I asked Steve Bannon, who had served as the CEO of Trump's 2016 campaign and had once again emerged as one of Trump's most important advisors, why the former president would go to Waco for his big campaign reboot. He wasn't particularly coy.

"We're the Trump Davidians," he told me with a laugh.

Even less subtle than the rally's venue was how Trump kicked it off, standing silently onstage with his hand on his heart while he waited for the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." But this wasn't a traditional version of the national anthem. Trump's campaign had queued up "Justice for All," a rendition of the song recorded over a jailhouse phone by a group of about twenty inmates serving time in a Washington, DC, jail for taking part in the assault on the US Capitol. In the song, the so-called J6 Prison Choir makes its way through Francis Scott Key's lyrics while Trump's voice interjects with stray lines from the Pledge of Allegiance, which he recorded at Mar-a-Lago.

As the recording blared over the loudspeakers, video footage from the January 6 riot played on the massive screens flanking the stage. It was a bizarre display, but also pitch-perfect in setting the tone for what was to come over the next ninety minutes: a defiant Trump at his most inflammatory, telling his followers to prepare for one final standoff with the shadowy enemies out to get him-and them. "For seven years, you and I have been taking on the corrupt, rotten, and sinister forces trying to destroy America," he said. "They've been trying to destroy it. They're not going to do it, but they do get closer and closer with rigged elections."

"2024," Trump declared, "is the final battle."

This wasn't a campaign speech in any traditional sense. Trump echoed the themes of paranoia and foreboding embraced by David Koresh and the anti-government movement that grew out of the Waco massacre. "As far as the eye can see, the abuses of power that we're currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, and depraved...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593473981
• ISBN 13: 9780593473986
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland