I don’t doubt Jonathan Karl’s reporting on this for a moment. Would Donald Trump have angrily lashed out at RNC chair Ronna McDaniel over his loss and threatened to start a new political party to burn the GOP to the ground? Sure … but almost a year later and no new party on the horizon, why is this news?

The standoff started on Jan. 20, just after Trump boarded Air Force One for his last flight as president.

“[RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel] called to wish him farewell. It was a very un-pleasant conversation,” Karl writes in “Betrayal,” set to be released on Nov. 16.

“Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes,” Karl writes. “He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn’t exist anymore.”

With just hours left in his presidency, Trump was telling the Republican Party chairwoman that he was leaving the party entirely. The description of this conversation and the discussions that followed come from two sources with direct knowledge of these events.

“I’m done,” Trump told McDaniel. “I’m starting my own party.”

“You cannot do that,” McDaniel told Trump. “If you do, we will lose forever.”

“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.”

Is anyone surprised to hear that Trump can be a bit of a sore loser? Not anyone who didn’t lock themselves into an Altered States-esque sensory-deprivation chamber from Election Day to Inauguration Day. We had two months of sore-loser behavior, as well as kooky conspiracy theories, pointless lawsuits, insane ideas about constitutional process, and the impact of telling Georgia voters that casting ballots in a special election was the equivalent of the Twitter meme Eat At Arby’s, with its predictable result. Democrats engaged in some sore-winnerism with a last-minute and equally futile impeachment in parallel.

Actually, in retrospect, that sensory-deprivation chamber sounds like a pretty good strategy.

So yes, this dialogue has a strong ring of authenticity. The reason that Trump supposedly backed down sounds less believable. According to Karl, the RNC told Trump that if he started his own party, the GOP would stop paying the legal bills for Trump’s post-election challenges and would withhold its e-mail lists. Neither of these sound like a particularly tough challenge for a multi-billionaire going back to his tycoon businesses. A few million dollars for lawyers wouldn’t faze Trump, and his own campaign and marketing could have eventually made up for the loss of access to the lists. In fact, I’d be surprised if the Trump campaign didn’t already have much of that data, if not all of it.

Whether the report is actually true is another question. Ronna McDaniel and Trump both deny it:

“It’s a totally made up and fabricated story, it’s fake news,” Trump said in a statement provided to The Hill. “Jonathan Karl is a third-rate reporter working for ABC Non-News,” the former president added.

McDaniel also denied Karl’s reporting when contacted by ABC News.

“This is false, I have never threatened President Trump with anything,” McDaniel told the outlet. “He and I have a great relationship. We have worked tirelessly together to elect Republicans up and down the ballot, and will continue to do so.”

Just because they deny it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, of course. But even if it did … so what? If Trump was the least bit serious about this threat (assuming he made it at all), that effort would have started when the plane landed. The effort to put together a national organization would have had to emerge at least by the beginning of summer. Instead, Trump focused on endorsing MAGA-friendly Republicans for office and his business interests.

It’s not as if Trump lacks the resources for it, nor the star quality. He arguably has more of both than Ross Perot did in 1991-2 when Perot launched the Reform Party and had a real impact in two presidential and several state elections. The 1998 gubernatorial election in Minnesota that put Jesse Ventura in office is a direct result of Perot’s efforts, for instance.

Instead, we’re ten months out from this exchange and less than a year from the midterms, and all we have are crickets on this front. No one’s been hired into an organization; no offices have been opened. There hasn’t been a single indication that Trump has formed even a re-election campaign, let alone laid the groundwork for a multi-state third party to compete in 2022 or 2024.

Also, while Perot seemed more oriented to the kind of organizing necessary for the launch of a competing party, Trump simply isn’t. He relied on the RNC for much of the organizing on the ground while Trump and his team focused on the broad strokes and rallies. (That was especially true in 2016.) It would be far easier for Trump to simply co-opt the RNC — which is what he did in the 2020 cycle. And it’s what Trump will try to do again if he runs for the nomination, unless a better candidate steps forward to make a pitch for the future rather than the past.