President Donald Trump told The Atlantic that being prosecuted by the Biden administration’s Justice Department “made me a lot stronger.”
In a long feature story released Monday, The Atlantic’s team asked Trump whether he thought four criminal prosecutions — concerning classified documents, alleged payments to an adult film star, and two cases connected to the 2020 election — had made him stronger.
“Shockingly, yes,” Trump told the magazine. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says — you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’
“Yeah, it made me stronger,” he said following a pause, “made me a lot stronger.”
Speaking to The Atlantic in both a late-March phone call and in-person Oval Office interview last week, Trump discussed a wide range of topics dating from his first term to the present.
The magazine said its reporters also spoke with “dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants” for the story.
The story said Trump who had authored “The Art of the Comeback” in 1997, knew he needed the right staff with the right stuff to return to the White House in 2024.
“He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—[former Republican National Committee chairman] Reince Priebus, [former White House chief of staff] John Kelly, [former Defense Secretary] James Mattis, [former Attorney General] Bill Barr, [former chief economic adviser] Gary Cohn — had blocked him,” The Atlantic story said.
“He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election.”
That “operative” was Susie Wiles, daughter of longtime NFL player and announcer Pat Summerall. Wiles had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Florida.
“Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities,” The Atlantic story said. “But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.”
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