Of Course Trump Couldn’t Resist Bob
Woodward
Once
again, he mistakenly trusted in his own ability to steer the story.
Maybe it’s all Senator
Lindsey Graham’s fault.
“It
was Lindsey Graham who helped convince Donald Trump to talk to Bob Woodward,”
Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson told
his TV audienceWednesday night. “Lindsey Graham brokered that
meeting. Lindsey Graham even sat in on the first interview between Bob Woodward
and the president. How’d that turn out?”
It hasn’t turned out well, of course. Trump admitted
in a taped interview with the veteran investigative reporter
that he knew in February that the coronavirus was far more serious than he was
acknowledging publicly. At least 190,000 Americans have since died from
Covid-19, hurried to their graves by Trump’s faltering, apathetic response to
the pandemic.
Trump
spent nine hours across 18 interviews with Woodward for his new book, “Rage,”
which has also spurred lots of finger-pointing in the White House. Senior Trump
aides, according to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, are also casting
about for targets to blame for granting Woodward relatively lavish access to
the president, as well as to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and many others.
I don’t work for Fox News
or the White House, but I can help both outfits sort through the blame game:
It’s Trump’s fault, and nobody else’s.
Trump is a media junkie who has a fixation on the very same reporters
he loves to castigate, and he has a limitless belief in his own powers of
persuasion. He has spent decades jousting with the media, successfully and
unsuccessfully, to shape his public image while snaring his ultimate prize
along the way: the spotlight. Trump as a canny, experienced entrepreneur
willing to break things to get the job done was a media creation that “The
Apprentice” put on steroids — and a chimera that helped propel him into the
White House.
In reality, Trump is like
a juvenile delinquent: willing to break things just because he likes to break
things. Still, he always believes that his version of himself and events will
eventually win out. So he keeps his shoulder to the wheel, constantly engaging
with the media even if it’s counterproductive and leads to self-immolation.
Trump spent dozens of
hours with me across scores of interviews for a biography published in 2005,
“TrumpNation.” I wasn’t unfamiliar to Trump when I began working on the book.
I was the research assistant for the late Wayne
Barrett on his book, “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth,” which
remains the foundational Trump biography. Trump so feared and loathed Barrett
that he had him arrested for trespassing when the two of us attended a Trump
birthday bash in Atlantic City in the early 1990s. I also interviewed Trump at
length in the mid-’90s for a book I wrote about gambling, and I covered him
extensively as a reporter for the New York Times in the early 2000s. None of my
coverage was purely positive; most of it was sharply critical. Yet he kept
cultivating our relationship, phoning me at odd hours for years, mailing me
envelopes packed with positive news clippings, and persuading
an assortment of advocates to reach out to me with tales of his grandeur
and derring-do.
Toward the end of our time
together on my book, as he drove me to one of his golf courses, he said he
would smear me in the media if my portrayal was negative. Why bother
cooperating with me in the first place, I asked? Trump explained.
“Number one, it’s going to
be an experience for me. Number two, I do enjoy your company. Number three, I
want to see if you get it right,” he told me. “It’s almost like a competitive
thing with me. I almost wanna see if you can get Trump.”
“Why not just blow me off entirely?” I asked.
“Because I’m sort of
curious. And I think you are starting to get me much better than you started to
get me when you first came up to my office.”
Then he added: “I’m not saying this to try
to convince you to try to do a good book or bad book. I think people are tired
of seeing the negative shit. You know one of the reasons my books sell is
because they’re positive. People don’t want to read about a negative Trump.”
My book turned out to portray a negative Trump. He then sued
me for libel and lost.
During the litigation, he had to produce his tax returns and other financial
records, and he also had to sit for two damning
days of depositions. The depositions, in which Trump, under oath,
was forced to admit 30
times that he had lied over the years about all sorts
of stuff are now a permanent part of the public record and his legacy. Trump
would have been wise not to sue.
Trump would have been
wiser not to cooperate with my book in the first place, and he would have been
wise not to have cooperated with Woodward’s book, either. He didn’t cooperate
with “Fear,” Woodward’s previous book, and that probably saved him some
additional grief. But here’s the rub: Trump isn’t wise.
Trump
regretted not cooperating with “Fear,” convincing himself that it would have
come out glowingly if he had engaged more directly with the reporter who
brought down Richard Nixon. “It would have been a better book if I talked to
him,” Trump said in 2018, according to the Washington Post. So he ambled into the
ring for round two, certain that he could steer the effort toward a positive
outcome. Graham and others might have laced up his gloves and escorted him to
his corner, but it was Trump’s choice. At age 74, he’s been battling and
courting the media for the better part of 50 years. He knows the game.
In an interview Wednesday
with the Washington Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, about why he
didn’t publish newsworthy portions of his book earlier, Woodward thought it was
notable that Trump called him at night. But as any reporter who has spent more
than one minute with Trump will tell you, once he begins the dance it’s an
all-hours affair.
Trump courts the media
24/7 because he is addicted to it, and addicts can’t help themselves.
Much
of what Woodward has so diligently reported confirms much
of what a raft of other reporting about Trump’s White House tenure has already
revealed: He doesn’t care about properly managing an epic public health crisis,
doesn’t care about the well-being of Black Americans, happily takes cheap shots
at the military, is dangerously loose-lipped about national security issues,
has an ill-informed and chaotic approach to foreign policy, and is wildly unfit
to be president.
Trump, in Woodward’s account, is the guy we’ve always known him to be,
a con man and a carny act. And once again, Trump has been undone by his own
words.
