| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Democracy. | |
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| Joining us now is Alex Eisenstadt. | ||
| He is a senior political reporter for Axios, also the author of the book Revenge, The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power. | ||
| Alex Eisenstadt, welcome to C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| What sparked this book? | ||
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unidentified
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You know, I've always loved campaign books. | |
| I've always been fascinated by them. | ||
| I wanted to write a book about Trump's comeback campaign. | ||
| I knew it would be a fascinating, dramatic, historic tale. | ||
| I didn't know how fascinating and historic and dramatic it would be in the end. | ||
| And so I wanted to create a fly-on-the-wall portrait for people to understand what happened behind the scenes in this two-year ride. | ||
| What is the timeframe of the book and why is that important to the story? | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So the book actually starts about two weeks before the January 6th Capitol riot. | ||
| And it ends on, well, it ends essentially on election night 2024, goes a couple weeks after that into the transition a little bit. | ||
| And so when you're during that period, describe your role reporting on the campaign, how much access you got to the president, those involved, and ultimately the material that makes up the book. | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Yeah, so I was at Politico at the time, my former employer. | ||
| And what I basically did was I went to people. | ||
| This is the beginning of the campaign, very early 2023. | ||
| I went to people who are close to Trump, donors, allies, advisors, people who talk to him regularly. | ||
| And I said, look, I want to write a book about what happened behind the scenes. | ||
| I want to talk to you on background, which means that their names won't be used at all, sort of anonymously sourced. | ||
| And a lot of them said yes. | ||
| Some of them said no, but a lot of them said yes in terms of wanting to help participate in creating this narrative. | ||
| And so those are people that I talked to really throughout for the next two years, went back to them again and again and again and asked them, tell me what happened today. | ||
| What happened then? | ||
| What did he say here? | ||
| What was the real story there? | ||
| And just try to create a narrative, TikTok, if you will. | ||
| And this would be traveling on the plane or Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| How widespread of space did you have when you were talking to people? | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So I went on the plane twice. | ||
| I went on Trump Force One twice. | ||
| I spent a little bit of time at Mar-a-Lago and I spent a lot of time in Palm Beach, Florida, where of course Mar-a-Lago is. | ||
| And I just talked with people on the phone a lot, had lunches with people here in D.C., stuff like that. | ||
| Ever talked to the president himself? | ||
|
unidentified
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I had, so I had one on-the-record interview with him on his plane in June of 2023. | |
| This was right after one of his indictments. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| You frame the book with the title, Revenge. | ||
| Talk about that not only as a title, but is it a driving force within the book and the campaign itself? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So revenge means a lot of different things, right? | ||
| When Trump made revenge the centerpiece of his campaign, he was running to be a vessel for the people who are his supporters, for people who he saw as his base, for people who he saw as his voters. | ||
| He could be a vessel for them, someone who got back at an establishment, at a class of elites who they feel frustrated with, who they feel turned their back on them. | ||
| And he identified with them, and they identified with him. | ||
| And so revenge became the centerpiece of his campaign. | ||
| And it also became the central playbook of what is now his White House. | ||
| And so you talk about the idea that he's standing in for the people, but how much of it is his own personal sense of revenge when it comes to the campaign and what you see now emerging from this second term? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, 100%. | |
| He definitely ran, at least in part because he wanted revenge, people on people who he thought stopped him or tried to impede him when he was president the first time around, people who he thought treated him unfairly in terms of the judicial system on the Democratic Party, on Joe Biden. | ||
| He saw this campaign as a means for him to get revenge on people who he regarded as his political enemies. | ||
| Was this idea of revenge something that you think developed during his time in politics, or is there something in his history as well that kind of led to what he would do as far as that impacts? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, no, I think grievance politics has always sort of been part of his mindset ever since he got onto the stage, right? | |
| He's always thought of himself as someone who's aggrieved. | ||
| And it's always been part of his mindset. | ||
| I think it's only intensified since he first burst onto the national stage. | ||
| You talk about several specific events in the book. | ||
| And just to give you a sense, we'll start with the arrest of Donald Trump. | ||
| And you wrote this saying, for most people, you write, getting arrested would be the worst day of the life. | ||
| He managed to turn his arrest in the Daniels case, the Stormy Daniels case, into high octane entertainment. | ||
| And the flight home felt celebratory. | ||
| Upon landing, Trump's fleet of SUVs made its way from Palm Beach Airport back to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president delivered a speech. | ||
| A crowd of supporters gathered in the ballroom, to which he aired to a national audience, I never thought anything could happen like this in America. | ||
| I never thought it could happen. | ||
| That's the story. | ||
| Set the context and how does it play to the theme of the book? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So this was Trump's first indictment in the Stormy Daniels hush money case in New York. | ||
| And the theme, visuals and Trump's understanding of political visuals plays an important, has an important role in the book, basically. | ||
| He understands the power of visuals in a way that few politicians really do. | ||
| And he and his advisors actually kind of compared, or his advisors did, actually compared the drive from Trump Tower in New York to the New York courthouse to the O.J. Simpson low-speed White Ford Bronco chase in the 1990s in Los Angeles in terms of they wanted to create, | ||
| they wanted to create sort of a dramatic, you know, a dramatic visuals, dramatic TV, so that viewers saw it in the same way. | ||
| And they were right in that this was a moment that could be heavily orchestrated. | ||
| It was a moment that they were in touch. | ||
| His team was closely in touch with TV networks about. | ||
| And so they understood that viewers like drama. | ||
| They like highly choreographed events. | ||
| He goes on to say, the only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it. | ||
| Again, taking his own personal issues, extending it to those who would ultimately support him. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, absolutely. | |
| He took his own issues and he kind of globalized them. | ||
| If you were to listen to him speak, he would be able to see how he could connect with people who are in Iowa, a struggling farmer in Iowa, someone in the inner cities in Detroit, all people who feel like the government has treated them unfairly. | ||
| And he was able to identify with those people. | ||
| They were able to identify with him. | ||
| Alex Eisenstadt joining us for this conversation about his book, Revenge: The Inside Story to Trump's Return to Power. | ||
| If you have questions for him, you can ask him on the phone. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| And you can text your questions to it if you wish. | ||
| 202-748-8003 on the legal issues. | ||
| How much of his own, the legal issues against him, how does that play into the revenge narrative? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So he was able to take the legal narrative, the legal case against him, and wrap it into a very tight narrative, which is that there is a broader legal system that is aligned against him, that is trying to destroy him, that is trying to jail him, that is trying to keep him from regaining power. | ||
| And he took it and cast it as this broader, amorphous, part of this broader, amorphous, quote-unquote, deep state that was out to get him. | ||
| His supporters began to see it the same way. | ||
| They began to see these as politically motivated. | ||
| And the interesting thing is, and this probably helped Trump, is that the Stormy Daniels Hushmini case, it was extremely fortuitous for him that that was the first case that he faced because it was the case that most voters felt was like the most politically motivated in terms of there were much stronger cases that Donald Trump faced. | ||
| The January 6th riot case, the classified documents case, the Georgia case about election interference. | ||
| Those were all arguably stronger cases. | ||
| And so the fact that the Hush Money case was the first case on the docket and the only case that went to trial really helped him. | ||
| I can think about, going back, I think about when they took the mug shot, they published that. | ||
| He's got it framed in the White House. | ||
| They made money off of it from selling it. | ||
| How does that fit into the narrative as well? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, again, Trump's understanding of visuals. | |
| And there's actually a scene in the book where he is flying back from Georgia where he had just gotten his mug shot taken. | ||
| And he immediately knew that this was a powerful image. | ||
| They used it immediately for fundraising purposes. | ||
| It raised huge amounts of money. | ||
| And it became this iconic, kind of this almost iconic image that was used, sold by places like Barstool Sports. | ||
| You had other bro sort of oriented websites that really embraced it, sold it as merch. | ||
| And it became an image that his supporters rallied behind. | ||
| It became something that he and his team really got to like. | ||
| Trump liked the way it looked. | ||
| You talked about his advisors. | ||
| During this time, who has his ear during this time advising him on how he's going to use these instances for a reelection campaign? | ||
| Who's the closest voice to him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So there are two real main characters in this book on that front. | ||
| The first is Susie Wiles, who's his co-campaign manager, now his chief of staff. | ||
| You can't overstate the role that Susie Wiles played in terms of she came back into his fold right after January 6th. | ||
| Trump had nothing at that point. | ||
| He had no political operation. | ||
| He didn't know what kind of money he had in his political operation. | ||
| He didn't really know who was working for him. | ||
| And she came in and she cleaned the slate and she built his political operation back from the ground up. | ||
| So she's a hugely important figure in this book. | ||
| She's now a hugely important player in this White House as chief of staff. | ||
| The other important figure is Chris La Civita, who of course is a longtime Republican strategist, big player in Virginia politics. | ||
| He joined Susie Wiles a little later on in the campaign, became co-campaign manager, and was a really important factor as well. | ||
| When did you notice that this would be the theme of the book? | ||
| When did it come to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it was sort of one of those things that developed over time, but definitely around the time of the Stormy Daniels hush money case. | |
| That was a real moment where it became clear that he would be running on revenge. | ||
| And then there's a really important moment a few months before that, actually, where Trump, if you go back to early 2023, he was in really dire straits politically, right? | ||
| And he found his footing when early in 2023, he goes on a trip to East Palestine, Ohio. | ||
| Trip organized by a guy by the name of JD Vance, who later on became his vice president. | ||
| And there had been a trail train derailment there, as a lot of your viewers will remember. | ||
| A lot of those people in that small Rust Belt town felt like the federal government and Joe Biden hadn't done enough to help with the train derailment and the cleanup. | ||
| And so Trump made a visit there and really went to a McDonald's, did some retail politics that you didn't see him do during his first term in office. | ||
| And it showed how he was going to run a campaign in which he identified with blue-collar people and people who had felt held back by the federal government. | ||
| And so that early visit, if you talk to people in the Trump campaign, you talk to people close to Trump, they'll tell you that was a hugely important moment. | ||
| It also demonstrates his ability to connect, though. | ||
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unidentified
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It demonstrates his ability to connect. | |
| And his visit to a McDonald's, what did you see him do in the months after that? | ||
| You saw him go back again and again and again to McDonald's to do real tail stops in places like waffle houses. | ||
| You saw him go to a McDonald's the week, the two weeks, in the weeks before the election. | ||
| You saw him pose in a dump truck, right? | ||
| He understood the power of these visuals. |