All the President’s Insecurities
Donald
Trump is his own whistle-blower.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 12, 2020, 11:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — During his 2016 bid,
Donald Trump would sometimes pause from bashing elites and the media to speak
with awe about a phone call he had with a Very Important Journalist.
Trump puffed up with pride as he told
the story to bemused rallygoers, who only moments before had been jeering at
the press.
It was, to say the least, a mixed
message from the phony populist.
During an interview in June 2016 at
Trump Tower, Trump bragged to me about the call with the journalist, who turned
out to be Tom Friedman. Lately, Trump has been boasting about Tom’s praise for the White House’s Israel-United
Arab Emirates peace plan.
Like Stella
Dallas standing in the rain outside
the gates of the mansion where her daughter is getting married, Donald Trump
has always had his nose pressed up against the window of the elites.
“For a man who has risen to the highest
office on the planet, President Trump radiates insecurity,” former Ambassador Kim Darroch wrote to his colleagues in London, in
a leaked cable.
Steve Bannon once told me that Trump
was much more concerned about CNN’s coverage than Fox’s. Trump was not seeking
affirmation from the nighttime slate of Fox knuckleheads; they were in the bag.
Unserious though he may be, Trump covets praise from serious people. And
serious Sean Hannity is not.
Fresh off his win in 2016, he was eager
to come talk to The New York Times. I’ve never seen
Trump happier than in that hour with the “failing” New York Times. (He even got
to upbraid me in front of my boss.) As we wrapped up, he told the assembled
editors, reporters and Times brass: “It’s a great honor. I will say, The Times
is, it’s a great, great American jewel. A world jewel. And I hope we can all
get along.”
That same eager tone was echoed in the
audio of Bob Woodward’s tapes with Trump, as the president warmly spoke the
name “Bob” again and again, yearning for acceptance from the very establishment
that he had denounced to win the Oval Office.
Even though Woodward
keeps writing books about Trump with titles that sound like Hitchcock horror
flicks — first “Fear” and now “Rage” — Trump somehow thought he could win over
the pillar of the Washington establishment.
“I brought something that I’ve never
shown to anybody,” the president told the writer in December 2019. “I’m going
to show it to you. I’ll get you something that’s sort of cool.”
He had an aide bring photos of him with
Kim Jong-un, including some capturing the moment when the two leaders stepped
over the line between North and South Korea.
“Pretty cool,” Trump gushed. “You know?
Pretty cool. Right?” He added, “I mean, they’re cool pictures when you — you
know, when you talk about iconic pictures, how about that?”
In a later interview, he gave Woodward
a poster-size picture of himself and Kim, saying: “I don’t even know why I’m
giving it to you. That’s my only one.” He trumpeted about Kim: “He never smiled
before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”
Trump also bragged to the man who
helped break the Watergate story, which sparked an impeachment inquiry, that he
handled impeachment with more aplomb than his predecessors.
“Nixon was in a corner with his thumb
in his mouth,” Trump said. “Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I don’t.”
Woodward once told me that every
president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves.
But at least with
Nixon, Woodward had to follow the money to expose the venality. With Donald
Trump, he simply had to turn on a recorder.
Trump is his own whistle-blower.
As The Times’s Nick Confessore put it
on MSNBC: “Trump is the first candidate for president to launch an October
surprise against himself. It’s as if Nixon sent the Nixon tapes to Woodward in
an envelope by FedEx.”
Trump fiends for legitimacy even as he
undercuts any chance of being seen as legitimate. He is fact-based and cogent
on the Woodward tape talking in early February about how the coronavirus is
airborne and deadly and dangerous for young people. But he vitiated that by
publicly downplaying the vital information for his own political advantage.
For more than a week, instead of
focusing on his peace deals and his nomination for the “Noble Prize,” as a
Trump campaign ad spelled it, everyone has been focused on a story that
contends he called Americans who died in war “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump desperately wants approval even
as he seems relentlessly driven to prove he’s not worthy of it.
He may be ludicrously un-self-aware,
but even he sensed that his tango with Woodward would end badly. It was fun for
a while, bro-ing out in the Oval with his fellow septuagenarian big shot,
batting around the finer points of white privilege. But it could not last.
“You’re probably going to screw me,”
the president told the writer. “You know, because that’s the way it goes.”
Even so, the unreflective Narcissus
will never drag himself away from his reflecting pool. You know, because that’s
the way it goes.