Did Trump get a debate question in advance? Megyn Kelly suggests so in new memoir.

By Paul Farhi for the Washington Post.

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly suggests in a forthcoming book that Donald Trump may have been tipped off about a question she planned to ask him during the first Republican primary debate last year, according to an early review of the book.

The question — about Trump’s history of making demeaning comments about women — produced one of the most famous exchanges of the presidential campaign and plunged Kelly into a long-running, if one-sided, feud with the man who was elected president on Tuesday.

But if the question was leaked in advance of the debate, it would suggest Trump had time to prepare his response, giving him an advantage over his Republican rivals. It would also parallel the disclosure that Donna Brazile, then a CNN commentator and the chair of the Democratic National Committee, leaked debate topics to Hillary Clinton’s campaign before Democratic debates.

The Trump debate episode is recounted in Kelly’s forthcoming memoir, “Settle for More.” The book will be published next week, but the New York Times obtained an advance copy and described the sequence of events in a review.

In response to the Times article, Kelly late Thursday night tweeted, “For the record, my book ‘Settle for More’ does not suggest Trump had any debate Qs in advance, nor do I believe that he did.”

But Kelly leaves that impression in her book, which describes her tempestuous relationship with Trump and with ousted Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, according to the Times account.

Kelly apparently drew Trump’s wrath a week before the first primary debate in August 2015. A segment on her show, “The Kelly File,” had upset Trump enough that he refused to do a scheduled interview with her unless she phoned him personally.

She writes that he told her, “I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you, and I still may.”

The day before the debate, Kelly writes, Trump was upset again and called Fox executives to complain about her. He said he’d heard that her first question as co-moderator “was a very pointed question directed at him.”

In fact, Kelly’s first question at the Fox-sponsored debate was about Trump’s references to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

Kelly doesn’t speculate in her book how Trump knew that her question would be directed to him, the Times said. But she writes, “Folks were starting to worry about Trump — his level of agitation did not match the circumstances. Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes.”

The anecdote raises its own questions about who within Fox News was aware of Kelly’s debate planning and could have tipped Trump.

Kelly doesn’t make a specific allegation, but does note that Ailes often responded to Trump’s complaints about Kelly by calling Kelly and asking, “Was I being fair to Trump? Was I being too hard on him? He felt the bar for skeptical Trump coverage should be higher.”

Following the first debate, Trump went public with his criticism of Kelly, calling her “overrated” and “a bimbo” on Twitter. He went on CNN and described her as having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her whatever.” He boycotted a Fox-sponsored debate before the Iowa caucus in January because Kelly was scheduled to be one of the moderators.

Ailes was forced out of Fox in July, amid widespread allegations of sexual harassment, including by Kelly herself. He became an informal adviser to Trump’s campaign.

Kelly’s debate anecdote raises some questions about Kelly herself, such as why she never reported anything about this episode to her viewers during the campaign and waited until after Trump was elected on Tuesday to reveal it in a book. It also adds an additional element to Kelly’s contentious interview with Brazile last month in which Kelly repeatedly asked Brazile if she had leaked debate questions to Clinton’s aides.

Fox News’ representatives did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

Kelly also recounts in the book a bizarre episode surrounding the first primary debate, according to the Times. On the day of the event, a driver assigned to her kept offering her coffee, which she refused. She finally relented and drank the cup he handed her. Within 15 minutes, she became seriously ill and feared she wouldn’t be able to appear at the debate. She did, but kept a trash can under her desk just in case she had to vomit.

Kelly doesn’t say so directly, but she suggests she may have been poisoned, the Times said.