Donald Trump has categorically denied a story that he became depressed and stopped eating after his 2020 election loss, claiming instead that he was actually “eating too much” at the time.
The account about the former president suddenly losing his appetite in the weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol appears in Liz Cheney’s upcoming book, Oath and Honor, in which former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) allegedly justified a secret trip to Mar-a-Lago over concerns for Trump’s well-being. In a Truth Social post early Monday, Trump vehemently denied the story and savaged his former GOP-colleague-turned-antagonist Cheney.
“Crazy Liz Cheney, who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome at a level rarely seen before, writes in her boring new book that Keven McCarthy said he came to Mar-a-Lago after the RIGGED election because, ‘the former president was depressed and not eating,’” Trump’s post began. “That statement is not true. I was not depressed, I WAS ANGRY, and it was not that I was not eating, it was that I was eating too much. But that’s not why Keven McCarthy was there. He was at Mar-a-Lago to get my support, and to bring the Republican Party together - Only good intentions.”
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According to excerpts from Cheney’s forthcoming book first published by CNN last week, Cheney accused McCarthy of taking the “craven” path and remaining loyal to Trump even after Jan. 6. She writes that she confronted McCarthy about his covert trip to Mar-a-Lago three weeks after the Capitol riot, with McCarthy claiming he’d been asked to visit by the former president’s staff, who were “really worried.” “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him,” Cheney claims McCarthy told her, with the ex-speaker adding that Trump was “really depressed.”
A McCarthy spokesperson told CNN in a comment: “For Cheney, first it was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and now apparently it’s also McCarthy Derangement Syndrome.”
Trump’s post Monday continued by contrasting McCarthy’s supposedly “good intentions” with Cheney’s defeat in the August 2022 Republican House primary in Wyoming. Trump falsely claimed that Cheney lost her seat in Congress “by the largest margin for a sitting Congressperson in the history of the U.S.” (Bob Inglis fared worse in his 2010 Republican primary runoff, though Cheney’s more than 37-point defeat was nevertheless one of the worst on record). “She then worked with others on the J6 Committee to delete and destroy the evidence and findings of the committee,” Trump added without evidence.
Cheney’s book, which is due for release on Tuesday and is subtitled “A Memoir and a Warning,” casts the 2024 election as a vote on “whether to preserve our republic.” “As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution,” Cheney writes.
“Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying in order to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in response to media reports about Cheney’s book last week. “These are nothing more than completely fabricated stories because President Trump is the clear front-runner to be the Republican nominee and the strongest candidate to beat Crooked Joe Biden.”
