All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America

Mar-a-Lago, as one Trump intimate put it, was less Camelot than Jonestown. • • • The feet-on-the-ground, putting-two-and-two-together, cause-and-effect world is where American politics, in its historic accomplishment, has always lived. It’s unclear at Mar-a-Lago what in fact are Trump’s actual or pretend intentions, with House members calling Trump staff in a panic to report that the Secret Service is coming to do a walk-through to plan for a Trump visit. In fact, some in the Trump circle had always believed there was the possibility of a technical truth here. (He’d denied Karen McDougal, too, but never so vociferously.) Steve Bannon speculated that Trump had “failed to launch.” And, therefore, he was telling the truth. In the end, Trump wrote much of it himself—the tell being the capital letters in the final document.