TRUMP
JUST COULDN’T STOP HIMSELF FROM SPILLING HIS GUTS TO BOB WOODWARD
The president’s ego got in the way of his own
self-preservation, leading to 18 interviews with the famed journalist. “It
actually reflects how deeply insecure he is about his own self-worth,” Trump
biographer Tim O’Brien told the Times.
BY ERIC LUTZ
SEPTEMBER
11, 2020
Donald Trump’s aides knew this would happen. Like the
lawyers who didn’t want him to sit for interviews with Robert Mueller,
fully aware that he would incriminate himself, many around the president knew
that talking to Bob Woodward was among the dumber things he
could do from a self-preservation standpoint. A lot of the time, it’s in public
figures’ interest to talk to journalists, especially if the end result will be
unflattering. Participating allows them, at the very least, to get their side
of the story out there. But Trump is an exception to this rule: No matter how
damning a portrayal will be, it can only be made worse by him opening his mouth.
That didn’t stop him, though. One of the
narcissist’s defects is believing that everyone else finds him as charming as
he himself does. Though Woodward had decimated him in his 2018 book, Fear,
the president seemed to believe that if he could only talk to the legendary
journalist—the guy whose reporting with Carl Bernstein ultimately
sunk Nixon—he could get him to see things his way. Aides tried to keep him from
talking. He didn’t listen. “You don’t talk the president out of things,” a
White House staffer remarked to Politico earlier
this week.
His judgment, once again, proved poor: Nothing
reported about Trump is likely to be as damning as his own words about the
coronavirus crisis in his interviews with Woodward. In the course of the 18
—18!—conversations he had with Woodward, the president casually revealed that
he knew that COVID-19 was far deadlier than the flu, spread through the air,
and posed a major threat to Americans’ lives and livelihoods, but intentionally
played down the danger in his public comments. The president and his propagandist, Kayleigh
McEnany, have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to convince Americans
that he wasn’t lying to their faces and was instead “expressing calm” to avoid inciting
panic. (And yet, terrifying Americans seems integral to Trump’s
reelection strategy). But the truth of the matter is can’t be spun away: The
president got Americans killed. How many of the nearly 200,000 dead Americans
could have been saved if he had taken action sooner, if his administration had
consistently treated it as the crisis it is? How many died because they
believed the president when he insisted COVID-19 was like the “sniffles?” How
many people got sick because they didn’t wear masks, went about their lives as
if things were normal, not taking the virus seriously—all because Trump didn’t
either? It’s absolutely abominable.
It’s also, politically speaking, one of the
more astonishing own-goals in the history of the presidency. As David
Frum pointed out, why, if he
knew how bad it could get, didn’t he do anything, if for no other reason than
to save his own ass? And why, after misleading the public about the scope of
the crisis, did he tell all that to Woodward? Most of us still would have known
that he had recklessly minimized the threat of the virus to keep up
appearances, costing hundreds of thousands of lives—but he could have
maintained some plausible deniability by not straight-up admitting that’s what
he was doing. Instead, he didn’t just spill the secret to Woodward; he
volunteered it.
Why? Because, as the Trump biographer
and Bloomberg writer Tim O’Brien put it to the New
York Times on Thursday, “he can’t help himself.” Woodward is a
towering figure in political journalism, having chronicled decades of
presidencies and bringing down one. “Bob Woodward is somebody that I respect,
just from hearing the name for many, many years,” Trump told reporters Thursday.
“Not knowing too much about his work, not caring about his work.” Talking to
Woodward was just another step in his sad, 74-year quest for validation: If
this important man wants to talk to me, I must be important, too.
“[Woodward is] sort of the establishment media’s version of Zeus, and I think
that makes him irresistible to Mr. Trump, in particular,” said O’Brien, who
interviewed Trump for a 2005 biography. “It actually reflects how deeply
insecure he is about his own self-worth.”
Other presidents, of course, have granted interviews to
Woodward. But Trump seemed to treat him as if he were a confidante like Sean
Hannity, phoning the journalist at night and spouting off about his love
for Kim Jong Un and boasting that he “saved” Mohammed
bin Salman for allegedly ordering the grisly murder and dismemberment
of American resident Jamal Khashoggi. These are objectively grotesque and weird
things to brag about. Trump, though, seemed to think they would impress
Woodward. Indeed, the president went to at-times comic lengths to show off to
the journalist. As CNN reports, Trump’s efforts
to woo Woodward included “giving a tour of the Oval Office, discussing his
preference for long neckties, and showing Woodward the hideaway office, which
he smirked and called the ‘Monica Room,’ a reference to Monica Lewinsky.”
If Woodward’s reporting reaffirms Trump’s
utter rottenness and unfitness for office, Trump’s participation in the book
underscores his obliviousness and his desperate, all-consuming insecurity.
Beating back that insecurity, of course, has been his lifelong project. For
years, these naked neuroses made him a tabloid joke. Now, they’ve made him a
threat to public health. He is, as always, completely at the mercy of his
impulses, completely consumed by his need to prove himself, even to those who
are allegedly close to him: “Honey,” he bragged to his wife, Melania
Trump, at one point during the reporting of Rage, “I’m talking
to Bob Woodward.”