“They said, ‘Concede.’ I said, ‘If I lost the election, I can handle it very easily—maybe not easily—but it’s fine.’ When you win … A man comes up to me the other night, a real expert on election—doesn’t work for me; you know you’ve got people all over the country working on this; it’s not acceptable—man came up to me and he said, ‘Sir, I do this professionally. I live for it. You not only won this election, you won this election in a landslide—by ten million votes. But more importantly than the ten million votes—you won all of the swing states…’”

“I’m thinking of calling this book Landslide,” I offered, only slightly concerned that he might read the irony.

“Cool title. The other title I gave you, Fire and Fury—and by the way, look how Kim Jong-un is behaving now. Look at how hostile Iran—and I’ll tell you, they were all behaving great. I did a great job with North Korea. And China was looking at Taiwan when I was there—now, all of a sudden, they got planes flying over Taiwan. But they weren’t looking at Taiwan under any circumstances; now they are looking at Taiwan. It’s called respect or lack of respect—for him. You know what I mean?…”

“Who was pressuring you to concede on Election Night?”

“Primarily RINOs, of which you have many, but fewer than you used to have. I guess I could think about names—but it was brushed away so quickly by me that it had no impact. When there’s theft, when someone steals something, you can’t just say … and this was stolen. Now Hillary Clinton with the Russia hoax—they like to use the term ‘illegitimate president,’ so I can assume I can use the same term.”

“Who were the important voices you were talking to at this point? Rudy—”