Reince Priebus, one of Donald Trump’s most trusted confidants and the President-elect’s incoming chief of staff, tried to convince his new boss to drop out of the race following the emergence one month before the election of a tape showing the mogul using crude language about women, a new report claims.
The onslaught of criticism of Trump that followed the leak in early October of a 2005 tape from an unaired “Access Hollywood” segment showing Trump bragging about grabbing women included demands from Priebus that Trump drop his bid, New York magazine reported Thursday, citing sources within the transition team.
According to the publication, Priebus told Trump that if he didn’t drop out, he would “go down with a worse election loss than Barry Goldwater’s.”
Publicly, Priebus, following the release of the tape, had only issued a statement saying that “no woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.”
It had been previously reported however that Priebus, like other senior Republican leaders, was furious over the tape’s contents.
The latest New York magazine article also revealed juicy details about ongoing tensions between Priebus and Stephen Bannon, who Trump tapped as his chief White House strategist.
Their struggle, sources told the magazine, has manifested most acutely in their boss’s search for his secretary of state.
Bannon had advocated strongly for the selection of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, while Priebus supports the pick of 2012 GOP nominee and former Trump critic Mitt Romney.
And it was Bannon, the magazine reported, who persuaded Trump to expand the list of prospective candidates to include Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) after controversy arose over Giuliani’s prior foreign business entanglements.
