Just if you thought it was protected to return in the water. Donald Trump is running for president again. That was not a prospect Bob Woodward needed to cope with when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, after Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein cracked open the Watergate scandal.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and it was. Nixon pale into jowly retirement. But Trump yearns to regain the crown.
Woodward spoke to the Guardian by cellphone six hours earlier than the disgraced one-term, twice-impeached president took the stage at Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy personal Xanadu in Florida, to announce what may or may not be the best political comeback of all time.
Does Woodward, who at 79 has written about 9 American presidents, suppose Trump can win once more? Or is Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, hammer of wokeness, now the man to beat?
“Who knows? Trump’s got tens of millions of supporters. DeSantis is the flavour of the month. DeSantis may be the one. Maybe not. I remember in 1990, before the ’92 presidential election, with a bunch of friends making a list of the 50 people who might be the next president. [Bill] Clinton was not on the list [though] he would have put himself there. So who knows? You can’t record the future.”
But you’ll be able to revisit the previous. Trump pulled off an unlikely victory in 2016 in what many noticed as an indictment of the media. While there was some positive reporting that left America in little doubt about what it was getting, there was additionally wall-to-wall cable information protection and a continuing strain for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to reply to Trump’s newest unhinged tweet. Are there classes to study?
Woodward says: “If you look back on 2016, there was a lot of good coverage but it was never enough. He was able to sell himself as a successful, wealthy businessman. What do we know about him now that we didn’t know in 2016? There is a lot of evidence, good reporting, investigations by some committees on the Hill, that actually he was not a successful businessman, he’s not wealthy. What’s the lesson from all that? Dig deeper and then, when you dig deep, dig deeper more and more and more.”
His picture burnished by the actuality TV present The Apprentice, the Trump of 2016 was in a position to essay the function of political outsider and swamp drainer. Now the novelty has worn off, he faces federal, state and congressional investigations and his 4 years in the Oval Office are a matter of document.
Woodward has contributed a trilogy of books – Fear, Rage and Peril (the final written with Robert Costa) – and now an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, presenting his 20 interviews with the president. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green referred to as it “a passport to the heart of darkness”.
Woodward continues: “Now he’s going to run again and we in our business need to focus on what he did as president. That’s the office he’s running for. Yes, it’s a political office, and you see all the stories now about the politics of Trump running, people abandoning him, people sticking with him and so forth – that’s an important story.
“But the real scorecard is what he did as president and on foreign affairs, dealing with Kim Jong-un or [Vladimir] Putin or all this stuff that’s on the tapes. He made it personal. He ran it on instinct.”
Woodward describes the tapes as a “laboratory” for understanding Trump’s presidency. “My conclusions are very severe. He failed as president, failed to do his constitutional, moral, practical duty, and I think, not all, but most of the reporting should be on his presidency.”
Woodward cites the instance of Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, estimated to price $1.9tn over a decade, criticised as a handout to the wealthy and firms at the expense of working households.
“I fault myself on this. I’ve not seen – maybe I’m not aware – of some really good reporting on the tax cut, how it happened exactly, who benefited. I wrote in one of my Trump books, Fear, that Gary Cohn engineered and drove it. The former president of Goldman Sachs benefited from that and you can surmise but I’d like to see my own paper or the Guardian or anywhere say: this is really who benefited from this.”
Nineteen of the Woodward/Trump interviews occurred in individual or by cellphone between autumn 2019 and August 2020, amid research for Rage.
This interval included the police homicide of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Woodward instructed to Trump that each had benefited from white privilege. The president was having none of it. He sneered: “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow.”
This chapter of Trump’s tenure was additionally outlined by the coronavirus, which emerged in China in late 2019 however which he downplayed, claiming it could vanish over the summer season. Now, greater than 1,000,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.
In The Trump Tapes, Woodward interviews Robert O’Brien, the nationwide safety adviser who warned Trump the virus could be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency”, and his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who likened it to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 650,000.
Woodward provides: “I discovered they issued this warning 28 January. I was as shocked as I’ve ever been as a reporter.”
By April, Woodward couldn’t resist pushing Trump to fulfill the second, telling him consultants have been saying he wanted to mobilise the nation, coordinate with intelligence companies and work with international governments. Woodward argued: “If you come out and say, ‘This is a full mobilisation, this is a Manhattan Project, we are going – pardon the expression – balls to the wall’, that’s what people want.”
Had he crossed a line? His spouse, Elsa Walsh, additionally a journalist, thought so. He remembers: “I did these interviews on speakerphone so I could record them with Trump’s permission. She was there many times and Trump knew that and then afterwards she said I was yelling at Trump and that I shouldn’t be doing that. I’m just supposed to ask questions. She berated me for this. It’s on the tape.”
But he insists: “It wasn’t an advocacy position. Trump had these coronavirus meetings and had virus deniers there and so the whole atmosphere was one of ‘Let’s not listen to the experts’. I knew some of these people and found out what they said and they were very specific and it had a logic to it, namely that overall Trump needed a world war two-style mobilisation to deal with this.
“I couldn’t talk to him so I passed it on and made it clear this is not me but this is my reporting from what the experts are saying. As I said to my wife, we’re in a different world. It’s the reporter who’s on the street and sees somebody shot. Go help them as a human being and then you phone in the story. This is of the magnitude that 1.1 million people died in this country because of the virus.”
By the summer season, the scale of Trump’s failure and the value in demise and grief have been clear. In the tapes, Woodward asks: “Was there a moment in all of this last two months where you said to yourself, ‘Ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?’”
Trump replies, with lifeless finality: “No.”
Woodward displays: “Even then, let alone now, it was the leadership test of a lifetime and just, ‘No’. It’s tragic. Not only did he conceal what he knew and deny it but it’s a crime. It’s a moral crime to know all this and not tell the people. I once asked him the job of the president and he said, ‘To protect the people.’ I’ve never heard about or read anywhere in my own reporting or in history where a president was so negligent.”
The final lengthy interview befell on 21 July 2020. Woodward mentioned issues have been unhealthy. Trump didn’t perceive so Woodward needed to level out that 140,000 individuals had died. The president claimed to have Covid below management. Woodward requested, “What’s the plan?” Trump mentioned there could be one in 104 days. Woodward puzzled what he was speaking about. Then he realised: the presidential election was 104 days away.
Such exchanges are damning and be certain that greater than eight hours of conversations, by his personal phrases shall Trump be condemned. Why, then, did he agree to speak? As the comic Jimmy Kimmel put it: “Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes? With tapes!”
One reply is ego. Trump could be heard flattering “a great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward”. Woodward suggests: “I had been sceptical of the Steele dossier and the Russian investigation and had said so publicly. [Senator] Lindsey Graham, [Trump’s] supporter from South Carolina, had told him I would not put words in his mouth, which was true, and so he agreed to do these interviews.”
On the different facet of the coin, this can be a uncommon alternative to listen to the Woodward methodology. The Washington Post, the place he has labored for half a century, observed that The Trump Tapes “offers a surprising window into the legendary investigative reporter’s process – a perennial focus of both mystique and critique”.
At instances, Woodward indulges Trump’s streams of consciousness, airing of grievances and pathological narcissism. At others he cajoles, challenges or confronts. Woodward says: “He’ll talk and talk and talk but I ask questions, very specific questions. What are you doing about the virus? Tell me about Putin.”
He did miss one opening. He requested if, in the occasion of a detailed election in November, Trump would refuse to go away the White House. The president declined to remark.
“It was the only question he didn’t answer in eight hours – 600 questions – and I should have followed up. I should have said, ‘Wait a minute, why isn’t he answering that?’ I didn’t.”
Re-listening to all 20 interviews, and discovering it such a distinct expertise from studying the transcripts or listening to snatches on TV or the web, satisfied Woodward to launch the recordings – a primary in his lengthy profession. Raw and unfiltered, that is one occasion the place Trump doesn’t profit from a reporter “tidying up” his quotations to make him sound extra lucid and fewer repetitive than he actually is.
“To be frank, it’s very surprising and it’s a learning experience at age 79, having done this so many years, that there’s something about hearing the voice that gives it an authenticity and power,” Woodward says. “Especially Trump. He doesn’t ever hem and haw, he doesn’t go hmm. He just is right out of the box.”
Fifty years since the Watergate break-in, he sees a parallel with the secret White House recording system that caught Nixon.
“The Nixon tapes didn’t just come out as transcripts. They came out so you could hear it and this is a version of that. It’s the same problem of appalling criminal – I can’t use any other word for it – behaviour for a sitting president to look away.
“There’s a statement that Henry Kissinger once made: ‘What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design’. I’m not sure destiny exists, but what an extraordinary vehicle.”
