Donald Trump offered up a scathing review of Jonathan Karl and his latest book, despite the fact it was released nearly six months ago.
The president laid into Karl, the Chief Washington Correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of the Sunday morning program “This Week,” in a fiery Truth Social post shared Friday evening. While Trump didn’t explicitly name Karl’s 2025 book, “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America,” which was released in October, he did claim that the journalist’s new tome bore “no relationship to the truth.”
“Third rate news ‘anchor’ Jonathan Karl of ABC Fake News, the worst and most corrupt Network in the business, wrote another made up book about me where his stories and ‘reporting’ bare no relationship to the truth,” Trump wrote. “ABC was already forced to pay me $16,000,000 because of their false and misleading reporting. That was a Liddle’ George Slopadopolus error, but Karl is worse.”
Before signing off his message, Trump slammed Karl’s book as “a waste of time,” adding, “Fictitious quotes. Don’t buy the book!”
A representative for ABC News did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Trump was, of course, referring to the $15 million — along with an additional $1 million in legal fees — ABC News paid him to settle the defamation suit brought about over George Stephanopoulos’ comments about E. Jean Carroll.
Specifically, the lawsuit stemmed from a March 2024 interview, in which Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the civil case brought by Carroll. In reality, in 2023, a New York jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape, due to the specific legal definitions under state law.
Karl’s latest book follows “the extraordinary moments that ended one man’s presidency and brought another back to power,” per a summary.
“This is a story of unprecedented political plot twists, showing what happened behind the scenes as political fortunes fell and rose again, and as a new team coalesced around President Trump with the goal of creating an entirely new world order,” the description continued. “From President Biden’s shocking withdrawal and Vice President Harris’ historic run, to the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, his election, and the changes he has brought to every corner of the country, this book reveals in surprising new detail how we got here, and what we can expect from American politics in the years to come.”
This is not the first book Karl has written about Trump, as he previously released “Front Row at the Trump Show” in 2020, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show” in 2021 and “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party” in 2023.
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