https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-reinstated-jonathan-karl-tapes_n_6551b347e4b0373d70b2b682
Trump Believed He'd Be 'Reinstated' As President In Dangerous Conspiracy: Report
Former President Donald Trump “became fixated on an entirely unconstitutional idea” that he could be reinstalled as president eight months after losing the 2020 election, new reporting from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reveals
The report, stemming from Karl’s work on his upcoming book “Tired of Winning,” arrives two years after the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman shared that Trump had told people “he expects he will get reinstated by August” 2021.
Some of Trump’s advisers said at the time that the reinstatement comments appeared “to be just offhand musings,” The Washington Post reported.
But Trump’s bitterness over his 2020 election loss was paired with his fixation on a “blatantly unconstitutional” theory that he could return to power, Karl said on “This Week.”
Karl pointed to a June 2021 statement in which Trump used the phrase “2024 or before!” ― words Karl asked him about in an interview a month later.
“What do you mean by that? You don’t really think there’s a way you would get reinstated before the next election?” Karl asked the ex-president.
“I’m not going to explain it to you, Jonathan, because you wouldn’t -- you wouldn’t either understand it or write it,” Trump replied.
Trump’s “reinstatement” ― a theory linked to QAnon and peddled by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell ― had been dismissed earlier in the year by Jenna Ellis, the former Trump lawyer who recently pleaded guilty in the former president’s Georgia election case.
The former president nonetheless talked about the idea “a lot in private,” which caused some advisers to worry he had started to believe the theory, Karl said.
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