I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, from authors Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker, is the latest tell-all book about the Trump administration. I hope they never stop coming, not when the details are as wild as the former-president raging about typos (“What is f*cking wrong with these people? They can’t hit spell-check?”) and telling his then-chief of staff that Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things.” I Alone Can Fix It has another “so wild that I absolutely believe it” claim: that Rudy Giuliani hatched the Big Lie scam after having a few too many.
The scene: Election Night at the White House. Trump is watching the results “from his bedroom alone and from a family room with Melania, other family members and some of his most trusted aides, including Hope Hicks,” according to an excerpt from the book in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Rudy is at “his own command center upstairs on the party floor.” He was with his son, Andrew, and after awhile, the disgraced lawyer “started to cause a commotion. He was telling other guests that he had come up with a strategy for Trump and was trying to get into the president’s private quarters to tell him about it. Some people thought Giuliani may have been drinking too much.”
Giuliani went state by state asking [campaign manager Bill] Stepien, [White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows, and [advisor Jason] Miller what they were seeing and what their plan was.
“What’s happening in Michigan?” he asked.
They said it was too early to tell, votes were still being counted and they couldn’t say.
“Just say we won,” Giuliani told them.
Same thing in Pennsylvania. “Just say we won Pennsylvania.”
Later that night, after Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden, Giuliani continued to insist that Trump should say he won, results be damned. “Just go declare victory right now,” he told Trump. “You’ve got to go declare victory now.” Around 2 a.m., out walked Trump, who claimed that “we were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off.” He added, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
Months later, he still believes this, and it’s partially because of Rudy.
(Via the Washington Post)