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Trump told RNC chair he was leaving GOP to create new party, says new book
In his new book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," ABC News' Jonathan Karl writes that Donald Trump decided to leave the Republican Party before backing down.
Politics
In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party -- and that he didn't care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars, Karl writes his upcoming book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show."
The book gives a detailed account of Trump's stated intention to reject the party that elected him president and the aggressive actions taken by party leaders to force him to back down.
The standoff started on Jan. 20, just after Trump boarded Air Force One for his last flight as president.
"Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes," Karl writes. "He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president's son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn't exist anymore."
With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.
"I'm done," Trump told McDaniel. "I'm starting my own party."
"You cannot do that," McDaniel told Trump. "If you do, we will lose forever."
"Exactly. You lose forever without me," Trump responded. "I don't care."
Trump's attitude was that if he had lost, he wanted everybody around him to lose as well, Karl writes. According to a source who witnessed the conversation, Trump was talking as if he viewed the destruction of the Republican Party as a punishment to those party leaders who had betrayed him -- including those few who voted to impeach him and the much larger group he believed didn't fight hard enough to overturn the election in his favor.