Shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell did something extraordinary: He decided to disinvite Donald Trump from President Joe Biden's upcoming inauguration because he was worried Trump could use the occasion to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Karl's book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," details how after the Capitol attack, McConnell told aides he wanted the top Congressional leaders to draft a letter telling the then-sitting president that he was not welcome to attend the inauguration.
The events eventually prompted Trump to send off what would be his final tweet before being banned by the social media platform, according to "Betrayal," set to be released on Nov. 16.
"McConnell felt he could not give Trump another opportunity to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power," Karl writes in the new book. "McConnell wanted to get a letter together from the top four congressional leaders informing Trump that he had been disinvited."
But not everyone in Republican leadership was on board with McConnell's plan.
"Kevin McCarthy opposed the idea, arguing it would be an important message of unity to have Trump attend the ceremony as Biden took the oath of office," according to the book. "But McConnell was determined to disinvite Trump regardless of whether McCarthy would sign the letter."
McCarthy, Karl writes, would alert the White House about McConnell's plan to disinvite Trump. And before the letter could be drafted, "Trump sent out a tweet saying he wouldn't be attending."
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20," Trump wrote on Jan. 8.
In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party -- and that he didn't care if the move would destroy the Republican Party, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl.
Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars, Karl writes his upcoming book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show."
The book gives a detailed account of Trump's stated intention to reject the party that elected him president and the aggressive actions taken by party leaders to force him to back down.
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"Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes," Karl writes. "He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president's son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn't exist anymore."
With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.
"I'm done," Trump told McDaniel. "I'm starting my own party."
"You cannot do that," McDaniel told Trump. "If you do, we will lose forever."
"Exactly. You lose forever without me," Trump responded. "I don't care."
Trump's attitude was that if he had lost, he wanted everybody around him to lose as well, Karl writes. According to a source who witnessed the conversation, Trump was talking as if he viewed the destruction of the Republican Party as a punishment to those party leaders who had betrayed him -- including those few who voted to impeach him and the much larger group he believed didn't fight hard enough to overturn the election in his favor.
