One of the two heads of former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign recently made a eyebrow-raising admission about his claims of a supposedly stolen election in 2020.
In an interview with Atlantic contributor Tim Alberta, Trump campaign co-manager Susie Wiles (Chris LaCivita is the other) let it slip that she wasn't personally a believer in the former president's baseless assertions that he was the true winner of the 2020 election. Alberta wrote that he conducted multiple interviews with both LaCivita and Wiles over the course of roughly six months, and mined quotes from their conversations for his July 10 article entitled "Trump is planning for a landslide win."
One revealing exchange between Alberta and Wiles was about how Trump tended to continue bringing up his loss in the presidential election four years ago. The former president continuously refusing to acknowledge his narrow defeat appeared to worry Wiles on the campaign trail.
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"She boasted to me, during one conversation, that she had been somewhat successful in getting her boss to cut back on the rigged-election talk on the campaign trail," Alberta wrote, adding that Wiles said that “people want to have hope, they want to be inspired, they want to look forward."
"But in that same conversation, Wiles could not answer the question of whether the 2020 election had actually been stolen. 'I’m not sure,' she said, repeating the phrase three times," he continued.
Alberta added that, according to Wiles, Trump "thinks he knows” the true outcome of the election. But then, he noticed that Wiles seemed "to catch herself" when making the comment.
“But we know,” she added, “that it can’t happen again.”
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Trump himself has also let it slip that, despite all of his bluster, he knows he lost the 2020 election fair and square. In June, Vanity Fair co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh teased his forthcoming book by mentioning a conversation he had with Trump in which the former president admitted that he didn't win four years ago.
"In one of our conversations we were watching clips of The Apprentice, and I showed him a clip of Geraldo Rivera, who was a contestant. And he got worked up over their falling out and the feud that they had, and he said 'when I lost the election,'" Setoodeh told MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace last month. "And that was a really revealing moment to me and proved something I'd been thinking about, is Donald Trump is playing a character. He's a reality show character that projects this image that people want to see."
"And I think truthfully, if we were able to get inside of his head and find the truth, he would admit that he lost the election, because he said it to me," he added.
Click here to read Alberta's full article (subscription required).
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