Donald Trump Drew Up List of Enemies With a Sharpie—'We're Going to Get Rid of All the Snakes,' Book Claims
President Donald Trump drew up a list of his enemies working inside his own administration and instructed allies to "get rid" of them, a new book claims.
Cliff Sims worked on Trump's 2016 campaign and then for the White House as a communications aide until May 2018. Now he has released a tell-all memoir of his time working for the president, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, for which he received a seven-figure advance from publisher Thomas Dunne Books, according to The New York Times.
Related: A Holocaust survivor who knows Trump personally says America feels like Berlin in 1929
An advance copy of the as-yet unpublished book was given to The Washington Post, which reported that Sims writes of a paranoid Trump suspicious of the staff working for him.
In one episode recounted by Sims, he was in a private huddle with the president and Keith Schiller, his personal bodyguard and longtime aide. They helped Trump write an enemies list using a Sharpie and White House stationery.
"We're going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-feeders," Trump said, according to Sims.
The White House did not respond immediately to Newsweek's request for comment.
In another excerpt from the book, reported by Axios, Trump was so obsessed with cable news that he ordered staff to print out chyrons—the text at the bottom of the screen—so he can catch up later if he is not able to watch the shows at the time.
"He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies," Sims writes. "He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast.
"Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look?"
Related: Why the Trump presidency cannot be annulled—"It is a fantasy"
The book also says, "When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking.
"Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House."
Sims's book will be published January 29. It follows similar tell-all books by others who have worked in what they describe as a dysfunctional White House. These include former press secretary Sean Spicer, former political aide Omarosa Manigault and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
