A new book claims that Donald Trump abruptly ended a phone call with Kim Kardashian after she contacted him asking him to endorse her efforts to gain clemency for prisoners, Axios reports.
Jonathan Karl makes the claim in Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, set for publication Tuesday by Dutton. The publisher says the book “explores how Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his own image—and the wreckage he’s left in his wake.”
Kardashian, the socialite and media personality, is known for her prison reform activism. In 2018, she urged Trump to commute the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a Tennessee woman who had been convicted of a first-time nonviolent drug offense; Trump did so.
Karl writes that Kardashian urged Trump to grant more commutations in the days before he left office, and that Trump said he would if Kardashian could convince several of her NFL star friends to visit him in the White House. She attempted to make that happen, but couldn’t.
After Trump left the presidency, Karl writes, Kardashian called him to ask for his endorsement of more commutations.
“Hell no, the former president told her,” Karl writes. “He wouldn't do it. ‘You voted for Biden and now you come asking me for a favor?’ Trump told her. Kardashian has never publicly said who she voted for in 2020, but after Biden was projected the winner, she posted a tweet of Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris along with three blue hearts.” Trump, according to Karl, then hung up on her.
A spokesperson for Trump responded with what Axios says is an all-purpose statement about Karl’s book, calling it “filth” that “belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
