3/15/25: REVEALED: How Elon TOOK POWER In Trump's Inner Circle
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Joining us now is Alex Eisenstadt. He is a reporter at Axios, but more importantly for today, he is the author of a new book, Revenge, the inside story of Trump's return to power. Alex, one of the best campaign reporters out there. I'm excited to talk to him. Glad to see you, sir.

Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right. So the book is out. There's been some pretty jaw dropping stuff that has come out, one of them an allegation that Fox News fed some questions to Trump before a town hall. But broadly, Alex, I've followed you for many years. You've always had a lot of inside scoop. So without giving away too much so people will still buy the book, just tell us the broad narrative that you wanted to capture in this book.

So I started covering, I started writing this book in early 2023, and I wanted to just create a TikTok behind the scenes account of what happened during Trump's comeback campaign. So I talked to as many people in Trump's inner circle as I could.

And the idea was to create a fly on the wall narrative. And I didn't know, none of us knew what would happen in this campaign when it first began, but we all knew it was going to be dramatic. We all knew it was going to be interesting. And so my goal was to really capture that narrative. And it turned out to be just as dramatic and just as interesting as we all thought, if not more so. So two of the sort of most pivotal moments, it seemed from the outside, were the Biden switcheroo,

And then obviously the assassination attempt. From within Trump world, were those the two moments that seemed the most pivotal? Or were there others that you would add into that mix? What was the vibe like in each of those moments? I think that's right. I think those were definitely two of the most pivotal moments.

And you look at Butler and one of the things that that I talk about in this book was that there were actually a lot of there were a lot of scares. There were a lot of threats on Trump's life.

One of the things I talked a lot about after the Butler shooting was Iran and Iran's role in how it was threatening him. The extraordinary steps that the Trump campaign had to take in order to evade threats from Iran, including using a secret – putting Trump on a secret flight.

putting him on a flight other than Trump Force One. And then obviously the switcheroo. And one of the interesting things about the switcheroo was that Trump going into his first debate with Biden was actually afraid that if he hit Biden too hard, that Biden would drop out of the race. He kind of foresaw that.

the problem, he sort of foresaw the possibility that Biden could end up getting out of the race after the debate, which of course is what happened. So yeah, Alex, take us in those days. What was the thinking inside the campaign? Were they ever afraid of Kamala Harris? Were they very confident that they were going to win the whole time? What was their internal strategy during the switch?

So right after the switch, that month after Biden got out and Harris got in, that was probably the bumpiest time for the Trump campaign. Trump had just survived this assassination attempt.

He was very understandably very jarred, very rattled from it. He called a friend the day after the shooting, and he said that if the bullet had come within a hair closer, his brain would have exploded like a watermelon on live television. He was very afraid. After that, the shooting, understandably so for his life, he wondered a lot about staging for events. And then he was rattled about Biden getting out of the race and having this new opponent

And sometimes this manifests itself in Trump going off script, like he did at the National Association of Black Journalists meetings, such as when he went after Brian Kemp in Georgia. There was a month there where Trump was really was really off script for the first time. He had run this very disciplined campaign.

And for the first time, things didn't look good for him in that month. But then afterwards, when you got out of July, when you got out of August, Trump found his footing again and he was able to defeat Kamala Harris. The final few weeks of the race, Trump was concerned. He definitely had some jitters, but things definitely turned around for him from there. Interesting. Talk a little bit about the Elon Musk relationship.

relationship, which has come to be like the most central dynamic of Trump 2.0, which is, I think, not something that many people truly expected. Although if you just look at the sheer amount of dollars that he put into the race, perhaps it should have been better anticipated.

How did that bromance begin? Because he had not only previously supported Ron DeSantis, I mean, he and Obama were buddies. Obama's administration gave him some critical loans to Tesla at an important time in his career. He'd previously been more inclined towards the Democratic Party. So

So what built that relationship? And then as a corollary, were you surprised to see Elon be so central, hog so much attention and for Trump to be like pretty subservient to him?

It was one of those gradual things, the Elon Trump relationship. One of the interesting things I talk about in this book is that Elon actually played a role in getting J.D. Vance picked for vice president. And that was one of the first roles that Elon played on the race. And one of the things that Elon told Trump right after the assassination attempt in Butler, which was right before J.D. Vance was picked, was that if you pick someone

He told Trump that if you pick someone who hails from the establishment, quote unquote, deep state part of the Republican Party, that will give the deep state or the establishment more incentive to try to kill you again. And so that so Elon Musk was one of the last people to give Trump advice before he picked J.D. Vance and he waited for J.D. Vance. Let me just real quick on that before before you finish your answer, because that's very interesting nugget that I didn't realize before.

What do you think it was that made Elon want J.D. to be on the ticket? I understand how he pitched it to Trump because at the surface level, they actually seem to have some ideological distinctions. J.D. Vance has pitched himself more in the Trumpian sort of like populist nationalist lane. Elon is more of this like, you know, I would say tech feudalists like Javier Millay, anarcho-capitalist type. So what was it that why was he so interested in having J.D. Vance on the ticket?

The bottom line is that they both hail from the same kind of tech wing of the party. And Elon Musk is really close to a guy named David Sachs, who I'm sure a lot of your viewers and listeners will know. He's a guy. He actually has his own podcast called

It's called All In, and he's a big player in Silicon Valley. J.D. Vance is also close to David Sachs, as is Elon Musk. And so that was a really big connector in this. And then there were just other tech players. And that sort of served as a connection point between the two of them.

Interesting. Alex, you know, we're continuing like in this vein because you have also covered campaign finance really well. What do you make of the influence of Elon's money in the campaign? How determinative was it actually as somebody who's covered this for many years?

Yeah, I mean, he gave Trump essentially a $250 million infusion, and that's really important. And the role he played was important because Elon Musk's operation was focused on ground game and getting out the vote, not so much on TV ads. Yeah.

but mostly on ground game and getting out the vote. And so when Elon first started doing this, when his super PAC really first kicked up its operations, there were a lot of questions about the strength of Trump's ground game door knocking effort. And so Elon Musk put in a lot of money to help solve that problem.

And that was really important because there were a lot of concerns in Trump's campaign and in the broader Republican world that Democrats, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were just simply more organized in terms of getting out the vote. Yes. Do you think that Trump thinks Elon is the reason he won?

I don't think so. I think Trump thinks he's the reason he won. Trump always sees himself as being the primary player, the main driver of things. And so he definitely is appreciative of Elon Musk and what he did. But he doesn't—he sees himself as the guy who won this race for 100 percent sure. And so why do you think he has—

had such a different relationship with Elon than he has with anyone else where, you know, I mean, Elon's there holding court in the Oval Office in a t-shirt and a hat. Elon is taking control. Elon is, you know, putting out the messaging. Elon's creating political problems for Trump. And he's never really checked. I mean, we did have the secret cabinet meeting where apparently he said, okay, these guys are in charge. But it has been much more deferential than we've ever seen Trump be towards anyone else. Like, to what do you ascribe that?

Well, look, Elon plays by a different set of rules. You're 100 percent right. He is more deferential to Elon than he would be to really any other cabinet member or any other staffer that Trump has ever had in his two terms in the White House. But look, Elon's a different kind of player. He's worth

what, several hundred billion dollars at this point. And when you have that kind of money, it gives you enormous amount of power. It gives you the ability to go do whatever you want. He can go set up a super PAC. He could go back to his businesses. And so Trump has a lot less leverage over Elon Musk than he does a typical cabinet member. Elon's wealth gives him an enormous amount of power, enormous amount of sway over politics.

And so Trump's got to be a little careful in terms of how he handles Elon Musk. Interesting. All right. Well, I trust you, Alex, and everyone should go and buy the book. We appreciate you joining us, man. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's our pleasure.

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