'Sickest Thing I've Ever Heard': Donald Trump Insists He Never Threatened to Leave the Republican Party in 2021 Audio Clip
Donald Trump claimed that he never threatened to leave the GOP to form his own political party in a recently released audio clip from 2021.
The subject arose after an excerpt from Jonathan Karl's upcoming book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, alleged that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was told the controversial plan by the ex-prez himself.
"This is the sickest thing I’ve ever heard. I never said any such thing," Trump said to Karl in the clip obtained by political analyst and former White House advisor Jen Psaki. "You mean, I was going to form another party or something?"
"Oh, that’s bull----, okay?" he insisted. "Never happened."
Karl provided further details of the alleged conversation in his book, which is scheduled to hit shelves on Thursday, November 16.
"[RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel] called to wish him farewell. It was a very unpleasant conversation," the author wrote in a passage of the tell-all tome. "Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes. 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 excerpt continued. "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."
"I'm done. I'm starting my own party," Trump reportedly told McDaniel at the time.
McDaniel allegedly replied that if he did that, Republicans would "lose forever," to which the embattled politician responded, "Exactly. You lose forever without me. I don't care. This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me."
"[Trump] wasn't simply floating an idea," Karl wrote in the book. "He was putting the party chairwoman on notice that he had decided to start his own party. It was a done deal. He had made up his mind. 'He was very adamant that he was going to do it,' a source who heard the president's comments later told me."
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ABC News reported the excerpt of Karl's book.