#Bob woodward trump dossier tv

Woodward adds: “I discovered they issued this warning 28 January. In The Trump Tapes, Woodward interviews Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser who warned Trump the virus would 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.

Now, more than a million Americans have died of Covid-19. This chapter of Trump’s tenure was also defined by the coronavirus, which emerged in China in late 2019 but which he downplayed, claiming it would vanish over the summer. He sneered: “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Woodward suggested to Trump that both men had benefited from white privilege. This period included the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Nineteen of the Woodward/Trump interviews happened in person or by phone between autumn 2019 and August 2020, amid research for Rage. 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.” I wrote in one of my Trump books, Fear, that Gary Cohn engineered and drove it. I’ve not seen – maybe I’m not aware – of some really good reporting on the tax cut, how it happened exactly, who benefited. Woodward cites the example of Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, estimated to cost $1.9tn over a decade, criticised as a handout to the rich and corporations at the expense of working families. 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 describes the tapes as a “laboratory” for understanding Trump’s presidency. “But the real scorecard is what he did as president and on foreign affairs, dealing with Kim Jong-un or Putin or all this stuff that’s on the tapes. He failed as president, failed to do his constitutional, moral, practical duty Bob Woodward 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. Woodward continues: “Now he’s going to run again and we in our business need to focus on what he did as president. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green called it “ a passport to the heart of darkness”. Woodward has contributed a trilogy of books – Fear, Rage and Peril (the last written with Robert Costa) – and now an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, presenting his 20 interviews with the president. Now the novelty has worn off, he faces federal, state and congressional investigations and his four years in the Oval Office are a matter of record.

#Bob woodward trump dossier tv

His image burnished by the reality TV show The Apprentice, the Trump of 2016 was able to essay the role of political outsider and swamp drainer. What’s the lesson from all that? Dig deeper and then, when you dig deep, dig deeper more and more and more.” 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. He was able to sell himself as a successful, wealthy businessman. Woodward says: “If you look back on 2016, there was a lot of good coverage but it was never enough.

While there was some fine reporting that left America in no doubt about what it was getting, there was also wall-to-wall cable news coverage and a constant pressure for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to respond to Trump’s latest unhinged tweet. Trump pulled off an unlikely victory in 2016 in what many saw as an indictment of the media. So who knows? You can’t record the future.”īut you can revisit the past. Clinton was not on the list he would have put himself there. 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. “Who knows? Trump’s got tens of millions of supporters. 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 gaudy personal Xanadu in Florida, to announce what might or might not be the greatest political comeback of all time.ĭoes Woodward, who at 79 has written about nine American presidents, think Trump can win again? Or is Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, hammer of wokeness, now the man to beat?