Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America - Hardcover

Karl, Jonathan

 
9798217047000: Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217047000
Verlag: Dutton, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The must-read new book from Jonathan Karl, the author of New York Times bestsellers Tired of Winning, Betrayal, and Front Row at the Trump Show

In Retribution, Jonathan Karl’s unparalleled access brings us behind closed doors deep inside the White House and presidential campaigns, revealing the extraordinary moments that ended one man’s presidency and brought another back to power.

This is a story of unprecedented political plot twists, showing what happened behind the scenes as political fortunes fell and rose again, and as a new team coalesced around President Trump with the goal of creating an entirely new world order. From President Biden’s shocking withdrawal and Vice President Harris’s historic run, to the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, his election, and the changes he has brought to every corner of the country, this book reveals in surprising new detail how we got here, and what we can expect from American politics in the years to come.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

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, Betrayal, and Tired of Winning were instant New York Times bestsellers.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Felon and Front-Runner

The day after Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses in January 2024, the insurance company Allianz published a so-called Risk Barometer that warned of growing political unrest around the globe. "We have an increasing detachment of the political elite from the working class and the people that actually go to work every day," said Oliver Bäte, the company's CEO. "And that, I see as the number one risk for our societies."

The Risk Barometer didn't get much attention outside the business world, but it described precisely the conditions-the detachment of the political elite from the people who actually go to work every day-that made Donald Trump's improbable return to power possible.

After his lonely departure from the White House in 2021, Trump was detested by elites of all kinds-in the world of politics, yes, but also in business, law, academia, and media. Large corporations had refused to donate to candidates who had supported him. Major law firms had refused to represent him. Big tech companies had banned him from their social media platforms. Many of the people who served in his own administration had abandoned him, some darkly warning that he must never be allowed to return to power.

Hatred of those elites quickly became the driving force of Trump's 2024 campaign. He told his supporters that their problems and frustrations were caused by those same elites who had denounced him, had investigated him, and were now prosecuting him. The more he was attacked-by powerful figures in law, politics, and the media-the stronger his connection with the people who felt let down by those powerful figures grew. If voters returned him to power, he promised he would root out not just his own enemies but the enemies of ordinary, working-class Americans as well.

"For those who have been wronged and betrayed," he declared at a March 2023 rally in Waco, Texas, "I am your retribution."

By mid-April 2024, Trump had vanquished all his rivals in what had become one of the most lopsided, contested presidential primaries in American political history. More than thirty states had voted, and Trump had won all but one of them: Vermont, arguably the most liberal state in the country, had gone for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. His opponents had high profiles, and several of them were very well funded, but they had all dropped out by the first week of March. And unlike in 2016 and 2020, Trump also consistently led his likely Democratic opponent in the polls-and he had for months.

Politically, he had never been stronger.

Nevertheless, Trump was angry when he stood before the cameras on April 18, 2024-because he was not a free man. For the third day that week, he had been ordered to sit in a New York courtroom where he would have to relive an embarrassing and decades-old chapter of his life that had come back to haunt him. The jury his lawyers had worked to select that week would decide the fate of the first former president of the United States in history to be charged with a felony-or thirty-four felonies, to be precise.

On the days the court was in session, Trump wasn't allowed to travel around the country to campaign. He couldn't play golf. He couldn't even leave the confines of the New York courthouse at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Aides and Secret Service agents would make a daily lunch delivery to his grimy holding room, giving him some fast food to eat during the court's brief midday break.

To make matters worse, the decrepit old courthouse had a notoriously bad heating and air-conditioning system. The place was frigid. Shortly after the court reconvened for the third day of jury selection, Judge Juan Merchan issued an apology from the bench. "First, jurors, I want to apologize that it's chilly in here," he said. "We're doing what we can to control the temperature, but it seems like it's one extreme or the other. So, bear with us as we try to work that out."

Once the day's proceedings ended, Trump exited the courtroom and turned left down a dark hallway. With his entourage of lawyers and advisors lingering near the entrance to the courtroom, he walked along the worn tile floor and stopped to speak to a small group of reporters and a single television camera shared by the networks on the other side of a security barrier. The reporters were far enough away that he had to raise his voice, almost to the point of shouting, to be heard, his words echoing along the courthouse's marble walls.

"I'm sitting here for days now, from morning till night, in that freezing room," Trump complained. Looking directly into the camera, he said he should be out campaigning, not forced to defend himself against charges brought by Manhattan's Democratic district attorney.

"I'm supposed to be in Georgia," he said, his voice straining to reach the microphone on the other side of the metal bike-rack barricade. "I'm supposed to be in North Carolina, South Carolina. I'm supposed to be in a lot of different places campaigning, but I've been here all day on a trial that really is a very unfair trial."


In reality, though, Trump hadn’t campaigned much in the weeks before the trial began. With his Republican rivals vanquished, the presumptive GOP nominee was spending as much time selling Trump-branded products as he was campaigning. A few weeks after winning the New Hampshire primary, for example, he helped launch a line of Trump “Never Surrender” sneakers-bright gold and just $399 a pair!4 And not long after Nikki Haley, his last remaining rival for the Republican nomination, dropped out, he kicked off a joint venture with country music singer Lee Greenwood selling “God Bless the USA Bibles” for $59.99 the week before Easter. It was, according to the marketing materials, “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!”

The leading candidate for president of the United States hawking his wares like this was certainly a spectacle, but Trump was facing a serious cash crunch. He had been ordered to pay a $454 million judgment after losing a civil fraud case earlier that year, and he had been hit with a separate $88 million bill after being found liable for sexually abusing and damaging the reputation of a woman named E. Jean Carroll.

Now Trump had no choice but to spend four days a week (the court was not in session on Wednesdays) in a New York courtroom for the duration of his criminal trial, which was expected to last about two months. Over the course of the first three days, 190 potential jurors had been questioned, but a complete jury-including six alternates-had still not been chosen.

Although the trial hadn't really started, the once-and-future president had already endured multiple indignities. The seventeen-story courthouse was not only cold; it was constantly under construction, with scaffolding surrounding its exterior for the entire trial. At the same time, the building seemingly hadn't been renovated since it was built in 1941. The place was filthy, and parts of the courtroom were held together with duct tape. "DANGER" signs in the hallways warned that asbestos removal was underway. There was a plastic device filled with bait and poison just outside the main entrance: a trap to capture and kill rats.

The court proceedings themselves would bring a series of embarrassments to Trump. Stormy Daniels, the porn actress at the center of the case, testified, in rather graphic detail, that she'd had sex with Trump just four months after his wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Barron. She would also testify, in Trump's presence, that he had asked her to spank him with a rolled-up magazine that featured an article praising him as a business genius. Her deposition led Trump to audibly curse from his seat at the defense table, prompting Judge Merchan to call Trump's...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217047000
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland