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Jwhen you thought it was safe to go back into the water. Donald Trump is running for president again. This was not a prospect Bob Woodward had to deal with when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 after Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein broke open the Watergate scandal.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and that was that. Nixon faded and retired. But Trump longs to reclaim his crown.
Woodward spoke to the Guardian by phone six hours before the disgraced one-term, twice-impeached president took the stage at Mar-a-Lago, his lavish personal Xanadu in Florida, to announce what may or may not be the biggest political comeback on all the time.
Does Woodward, who at 79 has written about nine US presidents, think Trump can win again? Or is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the wake-up call, now the man to beat?
“Who knows? Trump has tens of millions of supporters. DeSantis is the flavor of the month. DeSantis might be the one. Maybe not. I remember in 1990, before the 1992 presidential election, a bunch of friends and I made a list of the 50 people who might be the next president. [Bill] Clinton was not on the list [though] he would put himself there. So who knows? You can’t write the future.
But you can revisit the past. Trump scored an unlikely victory in 2016 in what many saw as an indictment of the media. While there was some good reporting that left America in no doubt about what it was getting, there was also wall-to-wall news coverage and constant pressure on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to respond to Trump’s latest ill-advised tweet. Are there lessons to learn?
Woodward says: “If you look back at 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 in 2016? There is a lot of evidence, good reporting, investigations by some committees on the Hill, that in fact he was not a successful businessman, not rich. What is the lesson of all this? Dig deeper, and then when you dig deep, dig deeper and deeper and deeper.”
His image burnished by the reality TV show The Intern, Trump since 2016 has been able to portray himself as a political outsider and swamp drainer. Now the novelty is gone, he faces federal, state and congressional investigations, and his four years in the Oval Office are a record.
Woodward is the author of a trilogy of books — Fear, Anger and Danger (the latest with Robert Costa) — and now an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, featuring his 20 interviews with the president. Lloyd Green of The Guardian called 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. This is the position he is applying for. Yes, it’s a political office, and now you see all the stories about Trump’s politics running, people abandoning him, people sticking with him, and so on—it’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 these things that are on the records. He did it personally. He ran it by instinct.
Woodward described the tapes as a “laboratory” for understanding the Trump presidency. “My conclusions are very serious. He failed as president, he failed in his constitutional, moral, practical duty and I think not all but most of the reports should be about his presidency.
Woodward cited the example of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, estimated at $1.9 trillion over a decade, criticized as a handout to the wealthy and corporations at the expense of working families.
“I blame myself for this. I haven’t seen – maybe I don’t know – any really good reporting on the tax cuts, how exactly it happened, who won. I wrote in one of my books about Trump, Fear, that Gary Cohn designed and drove it. The former president of Goldman Sachs is benefiting from this and you can guess, but I would like to see my own newspaper or the Guardian or wherever they say: this is who really benefited from it.’
Nineteen of the Woodward/Trump interviews took place in person or over the phone between the fall of 2019 and August 2020, amid research for Rage.
This period includes the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. Woodward suggested to Trump that they both benefited from white privilege. The president was having none of it. He chuckled, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? I’m just listening to you. Come on.”
This chapter of Trump’s tenure has also been defined by the coronavirus, which emerged in China in late 2019 but which he downplayed, claiming it would disappear by summer. More than one million Americans have now died from Covid-19.
In The Trump Tapes, Woodward interviews Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser who warned Trump that the virus would be “the biggest national security threat you will face during your presidency,” and his deputy, Matthew Pottinger , who likened it to the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 650,000.
Woodward adds: “I found they issued this warning on January 28th. I was as shocked as I have ever been as a reporter.
By April, Woodward couldn’t resist getting Trump to buy into the moment, telling him that experts say he needs to mobilize the country, coordinate with intelligence agencies and work with foreign governments. Woodward asserts, “If you come out and say, ‘This is full mobilization, this is the Manhattan Project, we’re going — excuse the expression — balls to the wall,’ that’s what the people want.”
Had he crossed the line? His wife, Elsa Walsh, also a journalist, thought so. He recalled, “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 said that I yelled at Trump and that I shouldn’t have. I just have to ask questions. She scolded me for it. It’s on the record.
But he insists: “It was not an advocacy position. Trump had these meetings about the coronavirus, and there were people denying the virus, and so the whole atmosphere was like, “Let’s not listen to the experts.” I knew some of these people and I understood what they said and they were very specific and there was a logic to it, which was that, in general, Trump needed a World War Two-style mobilization to deal with this.
“I couldn’t talk to him, so I passed it on and made it clear that it’s not me, but this is my report from what the experts are saying. As I told my wife, we are in a different world. This is the reporter who is on the street and sees a shot. Go help them as a human being and then call in the story. This is of the magnitude that 1.1 million people have died in this country due to the virus.
Over the summer, the scale of Trump’s failure and the cost in death and anguish became clear. In the recording, Woodward asks, “Was there a moment in the last two months where you said to yourself, ‘Ah, this is the leadership test of your life?’
Trump answers with dead finality: “No.”
Woodward reflected, “Even then, let alone now, it was the test of life’s leadership, and simply ‘No.’ This is tragic. Not only did he hide what he knew and deny it, but that is a crime. It is a moral crime to know all this and not tell people. I once asked him what the president’s job was, and he said, “To protect the people.” I have never heard or read anywhere in my own reporting or in history where a president has been so careless.
The last long interview took place on July 21, 2020. Woodward said that things were bad. Trump didn’t get it, so Woodward had to point out that 140,000 people died. President claims to have Covid under control. Woodward asked, “What’s the plan?” Trump said he would have one in 104 days. Woodward wondered what he was talking about. Then he realized: the presidential election is 104 days away.
SSuch talk is reprehensible and ensures that over eight hours of talk, in his own words, Trump will be condemned. Then why did he agree to talk? As comedian Jimmy Kimmel said, “Why would you agree to do 20 on-the-record interviews with the guy who took down Richard Nixon on tape? With ribbons!’
One answer is the ego. Trump can be heard flattering “the great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward.” Woodward offers: “I was skeptical of the Steele dossier and the Russian investigation and said so publicly. [Senator] lindsey graham, [Trump’s] supporter from South Carolina, I had told him I wouldn’t put words in his mouth, which was true, and so he agreed to do these interviews.
On the other side of the coin, this is a rare opportunity to hear Woodward’s method. The Washington Post, where he worked for half a century, noted that The Trump Tapes “offers a surprising window into the process of the legendary investigative reporter — a constant focus of both mystique and criticism.”
At times, Woodward indulges Trump’s streams of consciousness, airing grievances and pathological narcissism. At others, he woos, challenges, or confronts. Woodward says, “He’ll talk and talk and talk, but I ask questions, very specific questions. What do you do with the virus? Tell me about Putin.
He missed an opening. He asked if, in the event of a close election in November, Trump would refuse to leave the White House. The president declined to comment.
“That was the only question he didn’t answer in eight hours – 600 questions – and I had to move on. I had to say, “Wait a minute, why isn’t he answering?” I didn’t do it.
Listening to all 20 interviews and finding it such a different experience from reading the transcripts or listening to excerpts on TV or the Internet convinced Woodward to release the tapes, the first of his long career. Raw and unfiltered, this is one example where Trump doesn’t benefit from a reporter “editing” his quotes to make him sound clearer and less repetitive than he really is.
“To be honest, it’s very surprising and it’s a learning experience at the age of 79, after you’ve been doing this for so many years, there’s something about hearing the voice that gives it authenticity and power,” says Woodward. “Especially Trump. He never bends and walks, he doesn’t go hmm. It’s just taken out of the box.”
Fifty years on from 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 it. It’s the same problem with the appalling criminal—I can’t use another word for it—behavior for a sitting president to look away.
“There is a statement that Henry Kissinger once made: ‘What extraordinary vehicles fate chooses to carry out its designs.’ Not sure destiny exists, but what an extraordinary vehicle.
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