Trump was obsessed with theory that he'd return to White House within a year of loss: book

According to an upcoming book by ABC News' Jonathan Karl, Donald Trump believed a fraudulent conspiracy theory pushed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that claimed he could be reinstated as president before the 2024 election, Rolling Stone reported.

Lindell disseminated the claim that Trump could be back in power by Aug. 13, 2021, saying he could prove that the 2020 election was hacked by the Chinese. According to Rolling Stone's report, in the months after he left office, Trump became so obsessed with the theory that some of his advisers grew increasingly worried would pin all his hopes on it.

During a phone call in July of 2021, Karl questioned Trump on the theory, asking, “You don’t really think there’s a way you would get reinstated before the next election?”

“I’m not going to explain it to you, Jonathan, because you wouldn’t — you wouldn’t either understand it or write it,” Trump replied.

Rolling Stone wrote, "It's ironic that Trump was spreading the claim that a foreign government was trying to undermine the election while he was doing the same thing in Georgia by challenging the state's results.

"Also reported in Karl’s book, Trump appeared to misunderstand an insult from Angela Merkel when the then-German chancellor not-so-subtly compared him to Hitler," Rolling Stone's report stated. "'She told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine,' Trump reportedly bragged to a congressman."