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(CNN) – Former President Donald Trump’s senior general feared he would authorize an attack on Iran at the end of his presidency. His intelligence chief wondered what Russia had about him. A billionaire friend convinced him to try and buy Greenland. Half a dozen senior officials considered resigning en masse.
His wife, First Lady Melania Trump, was also “mortified by the coronavirus and convinced Trump was wrong,” according to an upcoming book by New York Times White House chief correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker writer and analyst. CNN’s global affairs Susan Glasser set for publication Tuesday.
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In a phone call with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has maintained ties to the White House despite occasional criticism of Trump, Melania Trump sought help in convincing her husband to take the pandemic more seriously.
“‘You’re wrong,’ she remembers telling her husband,” the authors write. “‘This is serious. It is going to be very bad and you need to take it more seriously than how you are taking it.’ She had just ignored her. “You worry too much,” she recalled that she said. ‘Forget it.’
The sharp instability that clouded Trump’s four-year term in the White House has led many of his top advisers to worry about the country’s fate. Volatility is laid bare with new details in the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021”. The book’s report included two interviews with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Baker and Glasser write that many of the well-known fears about the Trump presidency were, in fact, closer to reality than previously reported, prompting widespread attempts among those who worked for him to avoid disaster.
The revelations could also predict that the Trump presidency could oversee whether he returns to the White House in 2025. Trump aides told CNN he could announce a presidential offer following November’s mid-term elections. But, as Trump told Baker and Glasser, he won’t invite former Vice President Mike Pence to join his offer after Pence refused to interfere with the 2020 election certification.
“It would be totally inappropriate,” Trump said. “Mike committed suicide politically by not getting votes he knew were wrong.”
The book outlines deep concerns among Trump’s national security team, led by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and others, that the then president would launch a conflict with Iran in the final days of his. presidency or would have stumbled into a nuclear war with North Korea.
An administration official told Trump ahead of the 2020 election that if he lost, he would have to attack Iran’s nuclear program, the authors report. “Milley told his staff at the time that it was a ‘What the hell are these guys talking about?’ Moment,” they write. “Now, it seemed frighteningly possible.”
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Tensions with Iran have even permeated the walls of Mar-a-Lago. Trump told guests at a cocktail party over the 2020 holidays that he would be leaving soon to return to Washington for fear that Iran might attempt to assassinate him to avenge the US assassination of the country’s highest general a year earlier.
Concerns about Trump’s behavior on the world stage began as soon as he took office. More than a passing grudge, Trump’s desire to withdraw the United States from NATO was, in fact, a sustained effort that was “far more serious than previously thought,” said a senior White House official, an achievement that it could have drastically altered the ongoing war in Ukraine.
After a 2018 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland – in which Trump sided with Putin in US intelligence agencies that had determined that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election – the top official of the American intelligence wondered what Trump’s real motives were.
“I’ve never been able to come to a conclusion. The question has arisen in everyone’s mind: what does Putin have about him that leads him to do something that undermines his credibility? Dan Coats, the then director of national intelligence, reflected on the partners, according to the book.
And a months-long fixation on buying Greenland from Denmark went much deeper than previously revealed, inspired in the early days of the Trump presidency by a wealthy friend from New York, cosmetics heir Ron Lauder.
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“I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ Take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, look at a corner and say, “I have to get that store for the building I’m building”, etc. It’s not that different, “Trump told reporters for his book. .
Lauder approached then Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton to act as a “secret conduit” for the Danish government. Instead, top National Security Council advisors engaged in secret talks with the Danish ambassador to the United States on Greenland for months.
Eventually, however, public revelations about Trump’s plans to buy the island sparked outrage in both Greenland and Denmark, thwarting any attempts to strengthen the U.S. role in an increasingly strategic area. Trump called the Danish leader “bad” for rejecting the idea of him and canceled a trip to Copenhagen.
Trump has had friendlier relations with other world leaders, but has often imposed his own kind of chaos.
Baker and Glasser report that Trump once abruptly called Jordan’s King Abdullah II to inform him that he would “give him the Jordan West Bank,” prompting the monarch to tell a friend that he thought he was having a heart attack.
“I couldn’t breathe. He was doubled over, “she said.
According to Woodward and Costa’s book, General Milley feared Trump would “revolt,” so he took steps to protect nuclear weapons.
And while Trump often liked to advertise that then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in July, had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump explicitly made the request to Abe at a dinner in New York.
“The president asked Abe at dinner to name him,” a senior Trump national security official said in the book.
Baker and Glasser outline previously unreported plans by Trump cabinet members to collectively step down amidst the chaos, only to remain in their seats worried about who Trump might choose to replace them.
In encrypted text messages, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told a high-ranking aide that five senior Trump administration officials, including the Secretaries of Defense, Education, and the Interior, were about to step down. in the midst of a dispute in a particularly chaotic period before the 2018 intervals.
“Ok, for the first time I’m afraid for the country. The madness has been unleashed “, she wrote in the messages.
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Trump’s demands on his team included extravagant demands such as the abolition of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after he blocked one of his immigration policies.
“We will cancel it,” he told Nielsen, according to the book. She told Nielsen that if such a measure requires legislation, “then write a bill to ‘get rid of the fucking judges’ and send it to Congress as soon as possible.”
However, when it came to his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it was his most trusted advisors who encouraged him to do more, particularly in the early days when Trump seemed indifferent to the severity of the crisis.
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