Jeffrey Lord, the former Reagan administration official and pro-Trump commentator sacked from CNN officially over his mocking “Sieg Heil!” tweet, isn’t trying to get back into the cable-news game.
Instead, he’s focused on writing two new books: one is a nonfiction work about President Donald Trump, the media, and his CNN firing; and the other is a fictional political thriller that centers around the murder of a “Native American political superstar,” Lord tells The Daily Beast.
“The name of the book is…Designated Survivor,” he said in a brief phone interview on Friday afternoon. Lord said he’d been working on a version of this manuscript for years (and that the title predated the current ABC drama of the same name starring Kiefer Sutherland and Kal Penn), and has since updated details to fit the context of the Trump era.
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“But [my book] is about the assassination of the designated survivor, and what comes after,” Lord explained. “And who killed him and why. The designated survivor is a Native-American political superstar. Think of him as a combination of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, in the sense he's from New York, and he's a minority, very successful in real estate, has a political charisma, sort of a tabloid fixture, young and handsome. And [his party grooms] him to be the next president, and then that backfires, and he's killed. And the book is about who would do this and why.”
Lord has been "fascinated by the designated survivor topic [for decades]," he said, referring to the U.S. tradition of keeping one government official in the presidential line of succession at an undisclosed, secure location during the State of the Union address, in the event of a mass killing of the president and other officials. “I went to a State of the Union...with [President] Reagan before I worked for him, and I knew the whole drill,” Lord added.
The conservative writer claims that there is “interest” now in this manuscript (though he declined to go into specifics), and that he is also in the process of inking a book deal on a different item: a nonfiction book on Trump, the anti-Trump “resistance” from the left, the news media, and what happened to him at CNN.
He credited his potential book deals with the elevated profile he’s received from both CNN and Trump’s political rise. The president himself has mentioned Lord at multiple political rallies this year, including a Pennsylvania event this week that the pundit attended.
“It’s always funny to me about how now I get recognized [in public] now,” he added, chuckling. “People want to come up and snapped their selfies with me.”
Before losing his CNN contributorship, Lord had earned a reputation as one of cable-news’ most ardent Trump defenders, going out of his way to make outrageous or bizarre comments on-air, such as, “Think of President Trump as the Martin Luther King of health care.”
Shortly after his former cable-news employer dumped him, he was already in talks with Breitbart News to write for the site, as The Daily Beast reported in August. Lord currently writes columns, on a contributor basis, for Breitbart, Newsbusters, and other conservative publications.
Lord told The Daily Beast that just after he was fired from CNN, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart honcho and former chief strategist to President Trump, called him up and “personally asked me” to write for him.
