"I'm just not going to leave," Trump told aides after his 2020 election loss, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Donald Trump queried aides — including the valet who brought his Diet Cokes to the Oval Office — on whether he should refuse to leave office after losing the 2020 presidential election, according to a book from a New York Times reporter.
CNN reported Monday on the details from reporter Maggie Haberman's book, "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," which is due for publication on October 4.
Trump, Haberman writes, told aides that he would refuse to leave office after losing the 2020 election. He told one, "I'm not going to leave," and declared to another that "we're never leaving," adding, "how can you leave when you won an election?"
Trump even asked the valet tasked with delivering his Diet Cokes directly to his desk in the Oval Office about what steps and strategies to take in contesting the 2020 election, according to the book.
Trump, like many presidents before him, had a wooden call box on the desk in the Oval Office used for summoning aides with the simple press of a button. Trump designated the red call button on the box as a signal for an aide to bring him a cold glass of Diet Coke, his favorite soda, and showed off the feature to reporters early in his term.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows recalled in his memoir, "The Chief's Chief," how the red button made him "nervous" when he first saw it as a member of Congress in 2017.
The button, Meadows wrote, "seemed like something you might use to launch a nuclear missile, or maybe to order SEAL Team Six into action."
"I braced for whatever sonic boom, breaking glass, or cloud of smoke I assumed was coming. I sat there with my eyes wide," Meadows wrote, adding that it was "impressive" to see the button immediately conjure a valet with a glass of Diet Coke for Trump.
President Joe Biden removed the red button and the wooden call box from the desk upon taking office in January 2021, along with other aesthetic changes to the Oval Office.
Haberman's book details both Trump's insistence on seeking to overturn the 2020 election results and the tense atmosphere in the White House during those days. In one moment captured in the book and reported by CNN, senior White House advisor, and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, compared going into the Oval Office to a funeral proceeding.
"The priest comes later," Kushner quipped when asked why he wasn't going into the Oval Office along with a group of other aides to brief Trump.
