Front Row at the Trump Show
by Dutton
*The Instant New York Times Bestseller*
"A book historians will relish." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
"Must read. I've read every book about the Trump presidency. This is the best." —Bill Press
An account like no other, from the White House reporter who has known President Donald Trump for more than 25 years.
We have never seen a president like this...norm-breaking, rule-busting, dangerously reckless to some and an overdue force for change to others. One thing is clear: We are witnessing the reshaping of the presidency.
Jonathan Karl brings us into the White House in a powerful book unlike any other on the Trump administration. He’s known and covered Donald Trump longer than any other White House reporter. With extraordinary access to Trump during the campaign and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Karl delivers essential new reporting and surprising insights.
These are the behind-the-scenes moments that define Trump’s presidency—an extraordinary look at the president, the person, and those closest to him. This is the real story of Trump’s unlikely rise; of the struggles and battles of those who work in the administration and those who report on it; of the plots and schemes of a senior staff enduring stunning and unprecedented unpredictability.
Karl takes us from a TV set turned campaign office to the strange quiet of Trump’s White House on Inauguration Day to a high-powered reelection campaign set to change the country’s course. He shows us an administration rewriting the role of the president on the fly and a press corps that has never been more vital. Above all, this book is only possible because of the surprisingly open relationship Donald Trump has had with Jonathan Karl, a reporter he has praised, fought, and branded an enemy of the people.
This is Front Row at the Trump Show.Praise for Front Row at the Trump Show
“Jonathan Karl gives us much more than program notes for the Trump Show in this revealing and personal account of his relationship with our 45th president. We learn what it is really like to be on the White House beat, about the peculiarities of dealing with the personality in the Oval Office, and ultimately the risks and dangers we face at this singular moment in American history.”—Mike McCurry, former White House press secretary (1995-98) and director/professor, Center for Public Theology, Wesley Theological Seminary
“The Constitution is strict: It says we must have presidents. Fortunately, we occasionally have reporters as talented as Jonathan Karl—an acute observer and gifted writer—to record what presidents do. Karl is exactly the right journalist to chronicle the 45th president, who is more—to be polite—exotic than his predecessors.”—George F. Will
“No reporter has covered Donald Trump longer and with more energy than Jonathan Karl. It pays off in his account of what he calls the Trump Show with some startling scoops. What did the president scrawl across the rejected resignation letter from his attorney general? He tells us.”—Susan Page, Washington bureau chief, USA Today
“Jon Karl is fierce, fearless, and fair. From cub reporter at the NY Post to chief WH correspondent for ABC News, he’s covered Donald Trump—and the White House—for a generation. He knows the man, and the office. Front Row at the Trump Show takes us inside the daily challenge of truthful reporting on the Trump WH, revealing what’s at stake with vivid detail and deep insights.”—George Stephanopoulos
“Jonathan Karl is a straight-shooting, fair-minded, and hardworking professional so it’s no surprise he’s produced a book historians will relish. It’s about good old-fashioned news-getting—about the process and the rules and how it works. Overlaying it is this most amazing moment in American political history. Underlying it is a story about waking up each morning and trying against the odds to find out what’s true.”—Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
“Front Row at the Trump Show provides an unvarnished view of the deceptions, eccentricities, and occasional achievements of the Trump presidency from a first-rate television correspondent with a ringside seat.”—Lou Cannon, author of President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime
“Must read: Jonathan Karl's Front Row at the Trump Show. Time and again he was in the room where it happened. I've read every book about the Trump presidency. This is the best.”—Bill Press
“Mr. Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, necessarily tells the story from the media’s side, but he is a fair-minded reporter rather than a media cheerleader. Unlike other books about Mr. Trump by members of the news media, Mr. Karl’s book presents the 45th president as a complex, multilayered person… Mr. Karl also manages to convey something missing from other books by his media colleagues about the Trump era: the sheer hilarity of it all.”—Wall Street Journal
“A valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Front Row at the Trump Show is the best long-form study of the relationship between Trump and the media—and it’s not possible to understand the Trump presidency without understanding that relationship.”—The Morning Dispatch
“[Front Row at the Trump Show] is an attempt to capture the madness that is the Trump presidency and the danger to democracy it poses. Aided by measured prose and healthy skepticism, Karl succeeds. Well-organized and respectfully written before the pandemic, Front Row at the Trump Show conveys the chaos and the characters that inhabit the president’s universe.”—The Guardian
“Karl, the chief White House correspondent at ABC News, has known Donald Trump since 1994, and it shows.”—New York Times Book Review
“It was so good I was sad when it ended.”—Olivia Nuzzi, New York magazine
Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Front Row at the Trump Show was an instant New York Times bestseller.I didn’t have his phone number, so I dialed the one listed in the phone book for the Trump Organization.
“Can I speak to Donald Trump?” I asked.
It was an audacious call. I had been working as a reporter in New York City for less than a year. I had never met the man, and at this moment Trump’s home and office were the epicenter of the most intense media frenzy I had ever witnessed.
“What do you want?”
The woman on the line was Norma Foerderer, Trump’s longtime gatekeeper and someone so integrally involved in all his dealings— business and personal— that The New York Times had reported a few years earlier, “Some suspect she runs the company.”
At this point, all I knew about Donald Trump was what I had read in the newspapers or seen on television. But I figured I knew enough to say exactly the right thing to get him on the phone.
It was August 1994, and the public was fixated on the tabloid story of the decade: Michael Jackson had just secretly married Lisa Marie Presley— the King of Pop together with the daughter of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. And the newlyweds, who had not yet been spotted together in public, were trying to stay out of sight right in the middle of Manhattan— at Trump Tower.
The news had brought a mob of paparazzi, Michael Jackson fans, Elvis Presley fans, and a parade of onlookers hoping to catch the first glimpse of the married couple. So many people had surged to Trump Tower that the NYPD had cordoned off the sidewalks around the building, forcing the growing crowd to watch from across the street.
I was a twenty- six- year- old reporter more interested in politics than celebrity sightings and spent most of my time reporting on a new mayor in City Hall named Rudy Giuliani, but I was working for the New York Post and on this particular day, my editors only cared about one story.
So I made what I believed would be a slam- dunk pitch to get Trump on the phone:
“I want to do a story on why the most famous newlyweds in the world would have their honeymoon at Trump Tower.”
And sure enough, I got a quick call back. Donald Trump was on the line telling me to come on over. Along with New York Post photographer Francis Specker, I hustled uptown to Trump Tower. Walking past the police cordon set up to keep the paparazzi mobs away, I was whisked up to meet Trump in an office on the twenty- sixth floor filled with framed magazine covers featuring his favorite subject: Donald Trump.
It was a whirlwind from the start, a private tour of Trump Tower given by the man himself. The ground rules were simple: He would show me everything, I could use all the information he gave me, and I could quote him as “a source in the Trump Organization.” We met with Michael Jackson’s bodyguards and photographed the basement tunnels Jackson and Presley were using to get in and out without being spotted by the mob outside. He showed me a blue van with tinted windows in the garage— the couple’s secret getaway car.
He showed it all off— from basement to penthouse— and along the way my source in the Trump Organization gave me all the gossipy details. I learned the terms of Michael Jackson’s lease of the apartment directly below Trump’s own. He wanted me to know that Michael and Lisa Marie had lots of famous neighbors. Steven Spielberg had an apartment on the sixty- fourth floor, Andrew Lloyd Webber on the sixtieth. My source pointed out apartments he said were owned by Elton John, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Sophia Loren, and the British royal family. He told me of a woman who bought one apartment for several million and then bought the one below so she could put in a swimming pool. “It’s the most expensive pool in the world,” a source in the Trump Organization told me.
None of this was serious, but my editors at the New York Post ate it up. They had a screaming front- page headline—“INSIDE MICHAEL’S HONEYMOON HIDEAWAY”— and four separate articles inside the newspaper, including one headlined “Tour Bares the Secrets of Lisa and Michael’s Honeymoon Nest.” If any of the residents of Trump Tower were unhappy with the New York Post’s printing a graphic of the building with arrows pointing to where they lived, they would need to take it up with a source in the Trump Organization. The Post had a big exclusive for the front page and I had a new source.
At one point while he was showing me his apartment on the sixty- eighth floor— the same floor plan and décor as Michael’s, he told me— Trump stopped, turned, and asked if I wanted a picture. At first, I was a little confused. Didn’t he notice I had come with a photographer who had been snapping photos the entire time? But I quickly realized he was asking if I wanted to get a picture taken with him. And with that I stood next to Donald Trump and faced photographer Francis Specker.
At some point while I was still in New York, I put the photo in a frame, but when I moved to Washington some two decades ago, I tossed it in a box of other old photographs. And for more than a decade it has been in the box down in my basement. Looking at the picture now, it appears to me as if it just came out of a time capsule. I am wearing a heavily wrinkled suit and a tie I almost certainly bought for three dollars from a New York street vendor. The background is pure Trump: a crystal chandelier, glossy marble, a decadent ceiling adorned with carved stone, and gold— lots of gold. I have long hair and the awkward grin of a reporter trying to figure out why the guy he’s interviewing suddenly stopped to pose for a photograph with him. As for Trump, he is considerably slimmer than he is now, but it is striking how little about his appearance has changed: He’s wearing the same style of dark suit he wears now, the same long red tie, the same facial expression I have seen in a thousand other photos.
As my secret tour of Trump Tower ended, I figured this wouldn’t be the last time I’d call him and get a quick call back, but I had no idea where it would lead. I was a cub reporter for a New York tabloid. He was a flamboyant real estate developer with a scandalous personal life. As I shook his hand, I couldn’t have begun to imagine his journey would ultimately lead to the White House, and so would mine.
"A book historians will relish." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
"Must read. I've read every book about the Trump presidency. This is the best." —Bill Press
An account like no other, from the White House reporter who has known President Donald Trump for more than 25 years.
We have never seen a president like this...norm-breaking, rule-busting, dangerously reckless to some and an overdue force for change to others. One thing is clear: We are witnessing the reshaping of the presidency.
Jonathan Karl brings us into the White House in a powerful book unlike any other on the Trump administration. He’s known and covered Donald Trump longer than any other White House reporter. With extraordinary access to Trump during the campaign and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Karl delivers essential new reporting and surprising insights.
These are the behind-the-scenes moments that define Trump’s presidency—an extraordinary look at the president, the person, and those closest to him. This is the real story of Trump’s unlikely rise; of the struggles and battles of those who work in the administration and those who report on it; of the plots and schemes of a senior staff enduring stunning and unprecedented unpredictability.
Karl takes us from a TV set turned campaign office to the strange quiet of Trump’s White House on Inauguration Day to a high-powered reelection campaign set to change the country’s course. He shows us an administration rewriting the role of the president on the fly and a press corps that has never been more vital. Above all, this book is only possible because of the surprisingly open relationship Donald Trump has had with Jonathan Karl, a reporter he has praised, fought, and branded an enemy of the people.
This is Front Row at the Trump Show.Praise for Front Row at the Trump Show
“Jonathan Karl gives us much more than program notes for the Trump Show in this revealing and personal account of his relationship with our 45th president. We learn what it is really like to be on the White House beat, about the peculiarities of dealing with the personality in the Oval Office, and ultimately the risks and dangers we face at this singular moment in American history.”—Mike McCurry, former White House press secretary (1995-98) and director/professor, Center for Public Theology, Wesley Theological Seminary
“The Constitution is strict: It says we must have presidents. Fortunately, we occasionally have reporters as talented as Jonathan Karl—an acute observer and gifted writer—to record what presidents do. Karl is exactly the right journalist to chronicle the 45th president, who is more—to be polite—exotic than his predecessors.”—George F. Will
“No reporter has covered Donald Trump longer and with more energy than Jonathan Karl. It pays off in his account of what he calls the Trump Show with some startling scoops. What did the president scrawl across the rejected resignation letter from his attorney general? He tells us.”—Susan Page, Washington bureau chief, USA Today
“Jon Karl is fierce, fearless, and fair. From cub reporter at the NY Post to chief WH correspondent for ABC News, he’s covered Donald Trump—and the White House—for a generation. He knows the man, and the office. Front Row at the Trump Show takes us inside the daily challenge of truthful reporting on the Trump WH, revealing what’s at stake with vivid detail and deep insights.”—George Stephanopoulos
“Jonathan Karl is a straight-shooting, fair-minded, and hardworking professional so it’s no surprise he’s produced a book historians will relish. It’s about good old-fashioned news-getting—about the process and the rules and how it works. Overlaying it is this most amazing moment in American political history. Underlying it is a story about waking up each morning and trying against the odds to find out what’s true.”—Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
“Front Row at the Trump Show provides an unvarnished view of the deceptions, eccentricities, and occasional achievements of the Trump presidency from a first-rate television correspondent with a ringside seat.”—Lou Cannon, author of President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime
“Must read: Jonathan Karl's Front Row at the Trump Show. Time and again he was in the room where it happened. I've read every book about the Trump presidency. This is the best.”—Bill Press
“Mr. Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, necessarily tells the story from the media’s side, but he is a fair-minded reporter rather than a media cheerleader. Unlike other books about Mr. Trump by members of the news media, Mr. Karl’s book presents the 45th president as a complex, multilayered person… Mr. Karl also manages to convey something missing from other books by his media colleagues about the Trump era: the sheer hilarity of it all.”—Wall Street Journal
“A valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Front Row at the Trump Show is the best long-form study of the relationship between Trump and the media—and it’s not possible to understand the Trump presidency without understanding that relationship.”—The Morning Dispatch
“[Front Row at the Trump Show] is an attempt to capture the madness that is the Trump presidency and the danger to democracy it poses. Aided by measured prose and healthy skepticism, Karl succeeds. Well-organized and respectfully written before the pandemic, Front Row at the Trump Show conveys the chaos and the characters that inhabit the president’s universe.”—The Guardian
“Karl, the chief White House correspondent at ABC News, has known Donald Trump since 1994, and it shows.”—New York Times Book Review
“It was so good I was sad when it ended.”—Olivia Nuzzi, New York magazine
Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the State Department. He has reported from the White House under four presidents and fourteen press secretaries. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Front Row at the Trump Show was an instant New York Times bestseller.I didn’t have his phone number, so I dialed the one listed in the phone book for the Trump Organization.
“Can I speak to Donald Trump?” I asked.
It was an audacious call. I had been working as a reporter in New York City for less than a year. I had never met the man, and at this moment Trump’s home and office were the epicenter of the most intense media frenzy I had ever witnessed.
“What do you want?”
The woman on the line was Norma Foerderer, Trump’s longtime gatekeeper and someone so integrally involved in all his dealings— business and personal— that The New York Times had reported a few years earlier, “Some suspect she runs the company.”
At this point, all I knew about Donald Trump was what I had read in the newspapers or seen on television. But I figured I knew enough to say exactly the right thing to get him on the phone.
It was August 1994, and the public was fixated on the tabloid story of the decade: Michael Jackson had just secretly married Lisa Marie Presley— the King of Pop together with the daughter of the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. And the newlyweds, who had not yet been spotted together in public, were trying to stay out of sight right in the middle of Manhattan— at Trump Tower.
The news had brought a mob of paparazzi, Michael Jackson fans, Elvis Presley fans, and a parade of onlookers hoping to catch the first glimpse of the married couple. So many people had surged to Trump Tower that the NYPD had cordoned off the sidewalks around the building, forcing the growing crowd to watch from across the street.
I was a twenty- six- year- old reporter more interested in politics than celebrity sightings and spent most of my time reporting on a new mayor in City Hall named Rudy Giuliani, but I was working for the New York Post and on this particular day, my editors only cared about one story.
So I made what I believed would be a slam- dunk pitch to get Trump on the phone:
“I want to do a story on why the most famous newlyweds in the world would have their honeymoon at Trump Tower.”
And sure enough, I got a quick call back. Donald Trump was on the line telling me to come on over. Along with New York Post photographer Francis Specker, I hustled uptown to Trump Tower. Walking past the police cordon set up to keep the paparazzi mobs away, I was whisked up to meet Trump in an office on the twenty- sixth floor filled with framed magazine covers featuring his favorite subject: Donald Trump.
It was a whirlwind from the start, a private tour of Trump Tower given by the man himself. The ground rules were simple: He would show me everything, I could use all the information he gave me, and I could quote him as “a source in the Trump Organization.” We met with Michael Jackson’s bodyguards and photographed the basement tunnels Jackson and Presley were using to get in and out without being spotted by the mob outside. He showed me a blue van with tinted windows in the garage— the couple’s secret getaway car.
He showed it all off— from basement to penthouse— and along the way my source in the Trump Organization gave me all the gossipy details. I learned the terms of Michael Jackson’s lease of the apartment directly below Trump’s own. He wanted me to know that Michael and Lisa Marie had lots of famous neighbors. Steven Spielberg had an apartment on the sixty- fourth floor, Andrew Lloyd Webber on the sixtieth. My source pointed out apartments he said were owned by Elton John, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Sophia Loren, and the British royal family. He told me of a woman who bought one apartment for several million and then bought the one below so she could put in a swimming pool. “It’s the most expensive pool in the world,” a source in the Trump Organization told me.
None of this was serious, but my editors at the New York Post ate it up. They had a screaming front- page headline—“INSIDE MICHAEL’S HONEYMOON HIDEAWAY”— and four separate articles inside the newspaper, including one headlined “Tour Bares the Secrets of Lisa and Michael’s Honeymoon Nest.” If any of the residents of Trump Tower were unhappy with the New York Post’s printing a graphic of the building with arrows pointing to where they lived, they would need to take it up with a source in the Trump Organization. The Post had a big exclusive for the front page and I had a new source.
At one point while he was showing me his apartment on the sixty- eighth floor— the same floor plan and décor as Michael’s, he told me— Trump stopped, turned, and asked if I wanted a picture. At first, I was a little confused. Didn’t he notice I had come with a photographer who had been snapping photos the entire time? But I quickly realized he was asking if I wanted to get a picture taken with him. And with that I stood next to Donald Trump and faced photographer Francis Specker.
At some point while I was still in New York, I put the photo in a frame, but when I moved to Washington some two decades ago, I tossed it in a box of other old photographs. And for more than a decade it has been in the box down in my basement. Looking at the picture now, it appears to me as if it just came out of a time capsule. I am wearing a heavily wrinkled suit and a tie I almost certainly bought for three dollars from a New York street vendor. The background is pure Trump: a crystal chandelier, glossy marble, a decadent ceiling adorned with carved stone, and gold— lots of gold. I have long hair and the awkward grin of a reporter trying to figure out why the guy he’s interviewing suddenly stopped to pose for a photograph with him. As for Trump, he is considerably slimmer than he is now, but it is striking how little about his appearance has changed: He’s wearing the same style of dark suit he wears now, the same long red tie, the same facial expression I have seen in a thousand other photos.
As my secret tour of Trump Tower ended, I figured this wouldn’t be the last time I’d call him and get a quick call back, but I had no idea where it would lead. I was a cub reporter for a New York tabloid. He was a flamboyant real estate developer with a scandalous personal life. As I shook his hand, I couldn’t have begun to imagine his journey would ultimately lead to the White House, and so would mine.
PUBLISHER:
Penguin Publishing Group
ISBN-10:
1524745634
ISBN-13:
9781524745639
BINDING:
Paperback
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
Dimensions: 5.5000(W) x Dimensions: 8.2000(H) x Dimensions: 0.8000(D)