When Donald Trump wrote—or should we say, put his name to?—his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback, he’d had quite some experience of its subject. Here was a self-proclaimed master of the deal who, by then, had taken business bankruptcies on four occasions, yet somehow always managed to crawl back into his golden elevator. Up, then down again. Down, then up again. Destined to struggle his way higher. The Apprentice. His own firing from that show. The madness of his 2015 tilt at the Republican presidential nomination. His victory against Hillary Clinton in the election of 2016. Walls, gaffes, indiscretions, impeachment, all ending—or did it?—in defeat against Joe Biden and the horror of the Capitol attack on 6th January 2021.
It is at this point—Trump’s departure from the White House—that Meridith McGraw begins her clever act of reportage, Trump in Exile. You get the sense from the book’s opening moments that even Trump, a man used to rolling with the punches, is laid low by the end of his presidency. Establishment Republican figures who had spent so much time tickling his vanity were now hurrying away from this carnival of chaos; his own team was breaking up as even loyal aides sought new lives outside Washington; the perks of the presidency were suddenly withdrawn, including, crucially—given the number of federal cases swirling around him—the ability to pardon indicted criminals. Even Twitter was taken away from him, when the social media platform suspended his incendiary account after 6th January. This really was rock bottom. It would require the comeback of all Trump comebacks.
How would he pull it off? McGraw, a reporter for Politico, does what everyone should have done from the start, which is take Trump and his pronouncements seriously. She quotes from The Art of the Comeback itself, specifically its 10 rules for success. These range from the banal (“Be passionate”) to the ridiculous (“Always have a prenuptial agreement”). But as you read McGraw’s book, you realise that Trump follows his own advice down to the letter—and, in some bizarre, shamanistic way, it works. Of particular relevance are three of those rules: “Play golf”, “Be paranoid” and, most terrifying of all, “Get even”.
Playing golf has been a major part of Trump’s life for decades. In early 2021, it may even have been a solace. His retreat from the White House was not to his previous base of Trump Tower in New York City, which is a hostile environment for him now, but to the friendly grounds of his sprawling beach resort, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, which adjoins a Trump-owned course. This lends McGraw’s drama its own Elsinore: a cocktail castle where Trump would brood and plot and, naturally, shoot 18 holes on a frequent basis.
Many other former presidents would use this time to relax, to perhaps raise money and draw up designs for their presidential library. But, as McGraw puts it, Trump regarded the traditional establishment of a library in his name as “a cemetery for his career”—and he certainly wasn’t ready to shuffle off this political coil. So it never came up. Instead, even when playing golf, Trump would be stewing—on the election result, on the (crazy) notion that it had somehow been rigged by Mark Zuckerberg and the Deep State, on the (crazy) possibility that he would be reinstated as president within months.
The revenge-minded Trump is compared to a mafia boss on more than one occasion
This was the paranoid stage. And, strangely, it served Trump well. By June that year, he had brought in donations amounting to $100m—“Much of [it],” claims McGraw, “raised off Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen, that he needed money to support the audits [into ‘vote-rigging’] in Arizona and other states.” The moneymen were behind him, just like the applauding crowds in the dining areas of Mar-a-Lago were behind him, even as Republican legislators continued to run away from his lurid claims.
Those Republicans would soon come back to him, though. How could they not? Whether or not Trump decided to run again, he had still won 74m votes in the 2020 election—all built on a zealous Maga base whose allegiances lay with him and with any politicians he might endorse. And remember: he believes in getting even. He began to use his endorsements to embed Maga candidates within the Republican party, but also to take out the “Never Trumpers” he disliked the most—including Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick and (now ex-)congresswoman for Wyoming. McGraw compares the revenge-minded Trump to a mafia boss on more than one occasion.
This particular mafia boss once surrounded himself with goons—Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Miller. Their names still pop up in Trump in Exile’s cast of characters, as do those of Kanye West and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, but it’s telling how fleeting these references are. Other, more reliable, operatives come to the fore. One of them, Susie Wiles, a longstanding and very capable Republican adviser in Florida, is credited here with auditing Trump’s entire political and fundraising operation, and fixing much of it. A recent Politico article, by Michael Kruse, describes her as Trump’s “de facto campaign manager” for this year’s election.
Why should we care about all this now? Because Trump is a monumental figure, of course. But also because, as the example of Wiles shows, his recent history isn’t really history at all—it is the present. Some of the most enjoyable passages of Trump in Exile concern the subject’s rapprochement with JD Vance, the Ohio senator who’s now Trump’s running mate. This rapprochement occurred before Vance’s victory in Ohio’s senatorial elections in 2022 but after his rise to national prominence as the author of Hillbilly Elegy (see Susie Mesure, here) and as a critic of Trump. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon,” Vance wrote on Facebook in 2016, “or that he’s America’s Hitler.” Which is not the sort of reflection that Trump tends to forget—or forgive. Yet, in 2022, with Trump weighing up who to support in Ohio, various figures around him—including Donald Trump junior, the media personality Tucker Carlson and the hyper-capitalist Peter Thiel—were making the argument for Vance. “Is he on our team now?” asked Trump. “Yes,” came the answer.
Trump started to buckle. Whenever he watched Vance on Fox News, McGraw reports, he would say, “This JD, he really looks the part… very handsome man”—a debatable claim but an important one to Trump, who considers telegenic allure to be one of the most important political qualities. But the deal appears to have been sealed during a visit by Vance to Mar-a-Lago where, apparently, he put in “his best ever round of golf”, and followed it up with a photograph with Trump. Once again, Trump would observe, “You are one handsome son of a bitch.” An endorsement for the Ohio race was secured and, a couple of years later, so much more.
‘You are one handsome son of a bitch,’ repeated Trump to JD Vance
However, as Trump in Exile comes closer to today’s headlines—into 2023 and beyond—it does lose some of its forward propulsion, as though McGraw doesn’t quite know where to land her narrative. Still, there’s time for her subject to perform one more comeback, almost as impressive as that which starts the book. It’s hard to remember it now, but in the early months of last year, and despite all his work since 2020, Trump did not appear to be a shoo-in for the Republican nomination. The indictments were stacking up, and many party high-ups felt that the Florida governor Ron DeSantis would be a younger, cleaner, more energetic option for appealing to both the country as a whole and to the party’s Maga base. At one point, judging by one opinion poll, 33 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters were backing DeSantis.
Then came a brutal masterstroke from Trump (and an ironic one, considering Democrat attacks this summer): he decided to paint his rival as weird, starting with a story that DeSantis had once, on a flight and lacking a spoon, eaten a gloopy chocolate pudding with his hands. Mocking ads followed. Insinuations. Nicknames. And DeSantis was done. As McGraw puts it, in one of her many evocative turns-of-phrase, it was “a surgically precise spine removal, with no anesthesia”. If he weren’t such a bastard and a threat, you’d have to marvel at Trump’s ability to turn adversity into opportunity. Actually, you can marvel anyway.
But the artistry of Trump’s comebacks is also the problem, or at least part of the problem. For to keep on coming back you also need to keep on plunging into crisis—which Trump does with alarming frequency, generally at his own instigation. It’s a quality that’s well matched to reality television or professional wrestling, but not to the American presidency. Wherever the golden elevator takes him next, let’s hope it’s not the highest office in western democracy.
