Matt Drudge added fuel to the fire in his ongoing feud with President Donald Trump on Friday by prominently featuring an excerpt from Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” where he mused on why Jimmy Carter did not win reelection: “You can’t con people, at least not for long.”
The Drudge Report, a conservative news aggregator run by Matt Drudge, has faced mounting criticism from Republicans — including President Trump — for seemingly tilting away from cheering Trump on. When the excerpt appeared atop the site, the top story declared that Biden was “on the brink of victory.”
The excerpt reads as follows:
You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.
I think of Jimmy Carter. After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, ‘Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.’
I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.
But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job, and he lost in a landslide when he ran for reelection.
Other headlines highlighted on Drudge on Friday included “President turns angry and despondent as defeat looms…” and “PLANNING ‘VICTORY RALLY’ … Who will tell him?”