Journalist Bob Woodward is releasing a new audiobook featuring his recorded ‘raw’ interviews with former president Trump.
In the book’s introduction, Woodward explained that he is releasing the recordings in part because “hearing Trump speak is a completely different experience to reading the transcripts or listening to snatches of interviews on television or the internet.”
He describes Trump as “raw, profane, divisive and deceptive. His language is often retaliatory.”
“Yet, you will also hear him engaging and entertaining, laughing, ever the host. He is trying to win me over, sell his presidency to me. The full-time salesman,” Woodward said. “I wanted to put as much of Trump’s voice, his own words, out there for the historical record and so people could hear and judge and make their own assessments.”
Titled, “The Trump Tapes,” the book contains the 20 interviews Woodward conducted with Trump from 2016 through 2020.
It was during one of these interviews that Trump showed the journalist the classified letters North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had written to him, which later was one of the reasons behind the DOJ investigation into documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago.
“And don’t say I gave them to you, okay?” Trump told Woodward.
The tapes offer an extraordinary insight into Trump’s motivations and thinking, though very often it turns out Trump didn’t have a plan, for example when Woodward asks Trump his reasoning behind badgering Kim Jong to the bargaining table.
“No. No. It was designed for whatever reason, it was designed. Who knows? Instinctively. Let’s talk instinct, okay?” Trump said. “Because it’s really about you don’t know what’s going to happen. But it was very rough rhetoric. The roughest.”
And it reinforces some aspects of Trump we already know, such as his admiration for dictators and his belief that as President he ‘owns everything.’
Take this example: In a June 2020 interview after the protests over George Floyd, Woodward asked Trump whether he had help writing his speech in which Trump declared himself the “president of law and order.”
“I get, I get people. They come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. The ideas are mine,” Trump told Woodward in a June 2020 interview. “Want to know something? Everything is mine. You know, everything. Every part of it.”
The ‘Trump Tapes’ will be released Oct. 25.