Looooooollll how does Woodward do it? Does he walk in the office every morning with donuts and kolaches? Suffer through press secretary's bad tinder hookup weekends and Eric's dic pic conquests on POF? Maybe he just strolls in with his Trojan horse of gifts and non judgemental smiles of encouragement then build up rolls of tapes and notes for a semi annual book drop.
Equally amazing... this doesn't change any trump supporters minds... they will vote for him no matter how many Americans he killed...
Woodward reports new details on Russia's election meddling, writing that the NSA and CIA have classified evidence the Russians had placed malware in the election registration systems of at least two Florida counties, St. Lucie and Washington. While there was no evidence the malware had been activated, Woodward writes, it was sophisticated and could erase voters in specific districts. The voting system vendor used by Florida was also used in states across the country.
It won't change many minds, and minds are hard to change in this country in general, but I would never rule it out completely. If you lost a loved one to COVID after really trusting his stated point of view, and then you literally hear that he knew it was dangerous, it might hurt. My honest reaction to the new quotations: so we're dealing with a evil man and not an evil, totally stupid man. He actually heard and assimilated the information that the virus was much worse than severe flu and could be transmitted easily through the air. He got it. I wasn't sure he was still capable of that much listening in 2020.
Nixon has the most infamous tapes in presidential history. Trump: Of course you can record our interviews.
If the info can bring him profit (at the expense of others misery, wut?), then he's still capable of listening. Foreign reports of wounded/killed agents and servicemen? Can't make a dime off of that!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-was-ecstatic-about-talking-to-bob-woodward-until-he-wasnt ... That sense of impending dread stood in contrast to how the president initially felt about Woodward’s Rage, which deals with Trump’s handling of a range of high stakes national security issues in addition to the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump was “ecstatic” about the prospect of sitting for interviews with Woodward, according to a White House official, and relished some of his conversations with the famous Washington Post journalist. Ultimately, Trump spoke with Woodward 18 times for the book. And at some point along the way, he had a change of heart, becoming convinced that Woodward was using him. Trump then began rage-tweeting the very reporter with whom he was so psyched to go on the record. “The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been,” the president tweeted, seemingly out of the blue, last month. Later that month, Trump logged back on to blast the veteran reporter as a “social pretender” who “never has anything good to say.” It is unclear when, exactly, Trump decided that the Woodward book could prove harmful. According to a person with direct knowledge, Trump privately said before sitting for interviews with Woodward, that one reason he was looking forward to doing so was because of how “fair” the journalist was to him on the issue of “Russian collusion.” However, late last month, this source recalled the president complaining unprompted that the then-upcoming Woodward book would be filled with “fake stories,” and that the author was a “big phony.” The source did not recall Trump bringing up any of the stories or quotes he directly gave Woodward. The damage done by Rage’s release was apparent mere moments after the first stories about the book were published, with the White House scrambling to lay out a defense and struggling to find a coherent one. In a briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump “never downplayed the virus” despite Wooward quoting Trump saying he had done just that despite knowing it was deadly and airborne in early February. Less than an hour later, Trump himself admitted that he had indeed downplayed the pandemic, believing keeping people calm outweighed expressing alarm to Americans about the disease. “Well, as you said, in order to reduce panic, perhaps that’s so,” Trump said when asked if he downplayed the severity of the pandemic. “The fact is, I'm a cheerleader for this country. I love our country, and I don't want people to be frightened. I don't want to create panic, as you say. Certainly I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.” The remarks were part of a string of dizzying moments on Wednesday with White House aides casting blame over who had convinced the president it was a good idea to sit down with Woodward. Among those pinpointed for the decision was Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump confidante, who acknowledged in a brief interview with The Daily Beast that he had recommended to the president that he talk to the longtime Washington Post scribe. “Yeah. The last book Woodward wrote, Trump said he didn’t know that he had wanted to be interviewed,” Graham recalled. “So I said, well, the guy is a well known presidential author. And, you know, you got a chance to tell your side of the story. The president agreed and there you go.” Graham went on to dismiss the idea that Trump was wrong to have downplayed the pandemic publicly. “The idea,” he said, “of the president saying we're not all going to die seems smart to me.” But the public reaction to the Woodward book was yet another example of how the president and his team are often operating on vastly different planes, with Trump supremely confident in his ability to BS his way through any crisis and his aides often left to pick up the mess. Related in Politics The president has often felt that his interviews are smashing successes even when they’ve been widely panned by others, including by his own senior advisers, as pointless, self-implicating, or counterproductive.. In the wake of an interview with Axios earlier this summer—during which Trump trotted out an argument about coronavirus death stats that bordered on grotesque self-parody—the president gushed to several individuals close to him about how well the Q&A turned out and how he’d made some great TV, according to two people familiar with his private remarks. “He said it went very well and that Biden could never stand up to that kind of questioning,” one of the sources said. “He absolutely was not mad about it.” Such self-assuredness likely contributed to Trump’s decision to sit down with Woodward. So too did the reaction to Woodward’s first book on the Trump presidency. While it contained some revelations about Trump’s ignorance of important foreign policy issues, that work—titled Fear—was seen as a dud that lacked a literary punch or many shocking surprises about the president’s first year in the White House. It was also criticized for conspicuously papering over one of the major scandals of the first several years of the administration, describing former senior Trump aide Rob Porter’s White House activities in detail, while barely noting the abuse allegations that led to Porter’s departure. Trump, as Graham noted, never sat down with Woodward for Fear, a decision that was notable in the restraint that it showed. The longtime investigative journalist has vexed many White Houses with his work—— though his depiction of George W. Bush in Bush At War was seen as somewhat sympathetic. And, usually, presidents and their teams decide that it’s better to play ball than to let Woodward chip away at a story by getting source after source to eventually break their silence. “Yes, you almost always have to talk to him,” Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary for President Barack Obama, told The Daily Beast. “Woodward is a superb journalist. He reconstructs meetings like a puzzle. He knows it all before you start the interview. But the book isn’t going to be a heroic tale. It’s something to be survived through putting some context around what is almost always the messy process of governing.” But excerpts of Rage suggest that it will likely be one of Woodward’s more engrossing presidential reads, akin to his dismantling of the Nixon White House and investigation of the Reagan-era CIA. In addition to the president’s on-record comments about the severity of the impending coronavirus pandemic in February, Rage details Trump’s bizarre close relationship with brutal North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, as well as private (and unsupported) suspicions by former DNI director Dan Coats that Russia has damaging information on Trump. The book also catalogues the full extent of the White House’s knowledge and fumbling of the coronavirus pandemic, from alarm bells earlier in the year, to the federal government’s inaction during crucial months leading up to the spread of the virus in the United States. Indeed, many of the revelations in the book are newsworthy enough that media critics and journalists wondered whether Woodward should have disclosed Trump’s warnings about the pandemic sooner to jolt the public into understanding the severity of the impending coronavirus pandemic. ...
It was narcissism. Trump loves to talk, loves to talk about himself, loves to express his opinions, will say anything he sees as self-aggrandizement, thinks he can manipulate anyone into his service. The same bravado that got him there..... I read the first 'free' chapters of Cohen's book yesterday. Nothing I didn't already know, felt no need for more. The interesting part is how easily he was seduced by his own ego into totally subjugating to evil. Dude was already a millionaire.
"These gotcha books don't interest me much"... every republican in congress needs to be asked these questions every day...
“I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency's hand at that beautiful and sacred location.” hawt
Best late night Woody Orange Man has had for years... for free too! Melania must've got tired of him waving that pre-nup around for one complimentary blowie and a mandatory Taco Tuesday night per week.
