During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump lived off of fast food and lashed out at staff in expletive-filled rants. That’s according to a book by Trump’s fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and top aide David Bossie.
The Washington Post got its hands on a preview copy of Let Trump Be Trump, which is in bookstores on Tuesday, and shared a few key details.
Trump’s appetite for fast food during the campaign is already well-known with photos from during that period showing him chowing down on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BF4raEHmhag/?hl=en">McDonald’s</a> and Kentucky Fried Chicken. It turns out that he’s also a big fan of pizza and Diet Coke, while Vienna Fingers, Oreos, potato chips, and pretzels were stocked on his campaign plane.
As an example of Trump’s fast-food tastes, during one meal, he gorged on “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted,” the authors said.
The two campaign aides also described Trump’s frequent tirades.
“Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place,” according to the authors. “His wrath is never intended as any personal offense, but sometimes it can be hard not to take it that way. The mode that he switches into when things aren’t going his way can feel like an all-out assault; it’d break most hardened men and women into little pieces.”
The book also touches on key campaign moments that are still in the news more than a year after the election.
One passage describes campaign officials—including fired campaign manager Paul Manafort and advisor (and later campaign chairman) Steve Bannon—reading the New York Times report about a Ukrainian political party paying Manafort $12.7 million. “Bannon knew what he had in his hand,” the authors wrote. “It was an explosive, page one story.”
In May 2017, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to look into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Five months later, Manafort was charged with tax fraud and money laundering related to payments he received while working as an unregistered foreign lobbyist.
The book also touches on the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump is heard taking about what sounds like sexual assault, but what he later dismissed as “locker room talk.” Then Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus responded to the tape by canceling a meeting at Trump Tower out of exasperation.
“I got off the train in Newark,” Priebus allegedly told Bannon over the phone. “I’m going to turn around.”
Priebus also allegedly worried about Trump losing the “biggest electoral landslide in American history.”
Recently, Trump has reportedly tried to rebut the tape by saying it’s not his voice on the recording, a recent New York Times report stated. That flies in the face of his admission at the time that the remarks were indeed his own.
On Sunday, the Times published an op-ed by former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, to whom Trump made the remarks and who was later fired for his role. In article, Bush confirmed that it was Trump’s voice on the tape and said that there were seven other witnesses. “He said it,” the op-ed begins. “‘Grab ’em by the pussy.'”