But my family said to me – and Don has said this, and Ivanka, and my wife has said this – “Be more presidential.” Because I can be very presidential. I jokingly say, I can be more presidential than any president that this country has ever had except for Abraham Lincoln, because he was [unclear]. Right? You can’t out-top Abraham Lincoln.
BW: Isn’t that what people want to see now?
DT: Yeah. Yeah, but they said… Yes.
BW: In the Republican Party, I mean . . . there is a lot of angst and rage and distress.
DT: A lot. Record-setting.
BW: Record-setting.
DT: I bring…
BW: And you have to tame that rage, don’t you?
DT: Yes, yes, but I bring that out in people. I do. I’m not saying that’s an asset or a liability, but I do bring that out.
BW: You bring what out?
DT: I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I think it was . . . . I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do. I also bring great unity out, ultimately. I’ve had many occasions like this, where people have hated me more than any human being they’ve ever met. And after it’s all over, they end up being my friends. And I see that happening here. But when my wife and Ivanka and the rest of my family, for the most part — Tiffany, my daughter, she’s a very smart young woman, she’s up at University of Pennsylvania doing great — and she said to me the same thing.
BW: Be presidential?
DT: Be presidential. Now . . . .
BW: When did they start saying this to you?
DT: Well, they really started saying it before the last debate. The last debate. And if you noticed, my attitude was much different in the last debate, okay? But I said, wait a minute. According to every single — you know, Drudge, and all of the polls, they do these online – they have polls for everything. They do debate polls. And you know what I’m talking about.
RC: Sure.
DT: Hundreds of thousands of people vote. I won every single debate. Every single debate. And I was rough and I was nasty. And I was treated nastily by the other side too. And then Rubio went, you know, Rubio went Don Rickles on me, and all of a sudden he became cute and he started getting extremely nasty. And I had to get even nastier to him. Now, what happened —and then started with the Little Marco. Come on, Little Marco. Little Marco over here said this and that. And he didn’t want to — he didn’t stop that, he didn’t stop that because he was told, oh, he should stop. He stopped that because I was outdoing him. But here’s the thing.
BW: We understand the history of this. We followed.
DT: Right, but here’s the thing.
RC: So is it . . . .
DT: Wait.
RC: Sure.
DT: Okay, so my family comes up. Don. My daughter Tiffany, who’s a great kid. Ivanka. My wife. And we were together. They said, “Be presidential, Dad, be presidential.” Last debate. I said, wait a minute. If I get hit, I’m going to hit back. That’s not going to look very presidential, because I hit back and you hit back. I said, I’m going to give it a shot. And I was actually — you know, the last debate was actually a much different debate . . . .
RCO: Right.
DT: In terms of my tone. And I actually got my highest ratings on that debate.
RC: But I’m just struck by — we’re asking the questions about being presidential. So many other people have asked, can Trump pivot, can he shift to a different kind of tone? And correct me if I’m wrong, but my view, listening to you, is you actually don’t really have that much interest in changing too much.
DT: Not yet. Not yet.
RC: But it seems your natural inclination is to fight . . . .
DT: No.
RC: No?
DT: My — yes, always to fight. My natural inclination is to win. And after I win, I will be so presidential that you won’t even recognize me. You’ll be falling asleep, you’ll be so bored.
BW: Really. But when Ted Cruz said what he said, and then you said, I don’t need his support.
DT: I don’t need his support. I don’t believe I need it.
BW: Now, what would your family say to you?
DT: Well, what I said is, I don’t need his . . . .
BW: What would a president say? What would Reagan say? What would Lincoln say if the opposition came and said whatever they said, and then you said . . . .
DT: Well Bob . . . .
BW: Hey, look, we are going to bind up . . . .
DT: Yeah.
BW: Not the nation’s wounds at this point, the party’s . . . .
RC: You think maybe you do need Cruz’s support? Maybe you do need it at some point.
DT: I don’t think — I have the people’s support. I have a tremendous group. And by the way, let me just, before we get off that one — because you were saying about Cruz — it wasn’t like he embraced me.
BW: No, he didn’t.
DT: It wasn’t like he said, oh, I will endorse Donald Trump. He is so wonderful, and if I don’t make it he is somebody that I think would be fantastic. Well, he didn’t exactly say that, Bob. He said . . . . He was pained having to answer the question.
BW: Right.
DT: So it wasn’t like I’m saying, I don’t want his support, as he says great things about me. So I had no guilt whatsoever saying it. I do believe it.
BW: Do you think you’re going to be at a point where you’re going to have to call him and say, “Ted, I need you?”
DT: I’ll never have to call him. I may be at a point where I call him, but I never will . . . .
BW: And what would you say? If you won the nomination, would you call him and say . . . .
DT: I would call him to say congratulations on a great job. Because out of 17 people, you beat 16. Okay? Which is pretty good, to put it mildly. You know, we had a lot of talent. When I first ran, and this is where I had some doubts, because what do I know? I didn’t know most of these people. Although I’d been very political. I’d given a lot of money. I gave $350,000 last year to the Republican Governors Association. I was a member of the establishment, if you think about it, and very high standing because of . . . .
BW: Could you say to Ted Cruz, “Ted, the coalition-building is going to begin right now. I need your support and help and advice?”
DT: I don’t think I’d say it that way, but I would be able . . . .
BW: How would you say it?
DT: . . . to get along with some of the people that I was competing against. Now, I will say this: Some of the people that I was competing against, I’m not sure they can ever go back to me. I was very rough on Jeb. I was told when I first started that Jeb was the preemptive favorite. He was going to . . . .
RC: Right. But you don’t have a strategy for these “Never Trump” people? You would think if you’re the nominee, you would have to find a way to bring Bush into the fold, to bring a Rubio into the fold.
DT: I don’t think — look . . . .
RC: Do you have a strategy for that at all?
DT: I think that’s overrated, what you’re saying, about bringing them into the fold. At the same time, I think I would be successful with many of them. I don’t know that I’ll be successful with Jeb Bush.
RC: Right.
BW: How about Cruz? What would you say to him, Donald?
DT: I think I would . . . .
BW: Because this is really — I think this . . . .
DT: Yeah, I understand.
BW: We get pivot points, and we’re going from a phase of . . . .
DT: I think Cruz and I could get along very well. I actually think so. We got along very well for six months.
BW: Would you say, “I need your support?”
DT: We got along very well for six months when I was attacking everybody.
BW: Right. But now you’re going to have to reach out to him, aren’t you, if this is going to work?
DT: Well, we’ll have to see what happens. I don’t think now, Bob, because he wants to win and I want to win. And I guess Kasich wants to win, although Kasich’s only won one out of 28, right? That’s not so good.
RC: Our big picture is how Reagan in 1980 competed against George H. W. Bush in the primary, then put him on the ticket.
DT: Yeah, and got along. And truly disliked each other.
RC: And put him on the ticket.
DT: Yeah.
RC: Considers him to be part of the team, team of rivals. Could you have a team of rivals in a general election?
DT: I would never want to say that now. Right now, I just want to win. And I don’t want to say who’s going to be — as an example, people are saying, you should pick so-and-so as vice president. It’s just too early for that. In my opinion, it’s too . . . .
RC: You have a few names on your mind about VP?
DT: I do. I do have names.
RC: Can you share one or two?
DT: I’d rather not do it now.
RC: One or two?
COREY LEWANDOWSKI: But Dr. Carson’s come to the campaign, and Chris Christie’s come to the campaign, and they were rivals in the past. And they said there was one person who we believe is going to make the country great again.
DT: Very good point.
CL: And look, nobody hit Dr. Carson harder than Mr. Trump did. It was very fair, and he made a very impressive speech in Iowa.
DT: The only thing I did with Dr. Carson — because I respect him a lot — but I just talked about his book. Because he wrote things in his book, and all I did was quote from his book. Because, you know, it was tough stuff what he wrote about himself. He wrote about himself. It’s an amazing story. And he . . . .
BW: Without names . . . .
DT: . . . understands that.
BW: . . . as vice president, what would be the role and responsibilities of your vice president, should you be elected, should you win the nomination?
DT: Well, the number one role is to be a great president if something should happen. Okay? That’s always got to be the number one role for a vice president. After that, I would say, frankly, somebody that can help you get elected. And then thirdly, somebody that helps you with the Senate and with the House. So it would be a political person. In other words, I don’t need to have another great businessman come in and — I don’t need that. What I do . . . .
BW: Somebody who knows dreaded Washington, perhaps.
DT: Somebody that can walk into the Senate and who’s been friendly with these guys for 25 years, and people for 25 years. And can get things done. So I would 95 percent see myself picking a political person as opposed to somebody from the outside.
BW: And would that person be integral to the governing team you would have in the White House? Go to all meetings, have total access?
DT: Yes, I would. . . . Sure. Sure. This would be a vice president — I would like to have somebody. . . . For instance, somebody like Ben Carson. When Ben Carson came to me — not necessarily vice president — but when he came to me, he called, he said, “What you’re doing is amazing. It’s a movement. And you see that.” When I announce I’m going to go to Tampa three days before, and we go there three days later, there’s 25,000 people in the stadium that houses the professional sports teams . . . .
RC: No, it says a lot that — you are acknowledging that you don’t want to have another outsider as part of your team.
DT: Yeah.
RC: You need an insider.
DT: Somebody like Ben Carson, he never once said to me, could I have a position?
RC: He doesn’t fit that model.
DT: No, no, he doesn’t. But he will be absolutely somebody that I’d love to have involved with us at a high level, at a very high level. Chris Christie. Chris called, he said, I’d love to be involved. And I said, that’s great. I’ve never been a big one for endorsements. Although Tom Brady loves me in New England; I think that’s why I got 50 percent. Okay? Tom Brady loves me. [Laughter] That helped.
RC: So, sticking on this presidency theme for a second, I don’t think a lot of people know that much about how much you value discretion, loyalty within your business.
DT: Great loyalty, yes. Great discretion, great loyalty.
RC: But it’s different when you’re running the federal government.
DT: Well, it’s . . . .
RC: And one thing I always wondered, are you going to make employees of the federal government sign nondisclosure agreements?
DT: I think they should. You know, when somebody — and I see it all the time. . . . And I don’t know, there could be some kind of a law that you can’t do this. But when people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that. I mean, I’ll be honest. And people would say, oh, that’s terrible, you’re taking away his right to free speech. Well, he’s going in. . . . I would say . . . I do have nondisclosure deals. That’s why you don’t read that. . . .
BW: With everyone? Corey has one, Hope has one.
DT: Corey has one, Hope has one. Did you sign one?
HH: Of course.
CL: Stephen [Miller, Trump’s policy adviser] has one.
DT: Stephen has one.
CL: [Donald Trump, Jr.] has one.
DTJ.: I don’t have one. I’m in the middle of the book. [Laughter]
CL: Don has two. [Laughter]
DT: I know, I forgot, he’s the one I’m most worried about.
DTJ: I’m not getting next week’s paycheck until I sign one.
DT: I have a very, very, very prominent businessman who’s right now got a person — he’s involved in litigation, terrible litigation with somebody that worked for him in a very close level. And I said why are you . . . .
BW: Do you think these are airtight agreements?
DT: Yeah, totally. I think they’re very airtight. They’re very . . . .
BW: And that no one could write a book or . . . .
DT: I think they’re extremely airtight. And anybody that violated it — let’s put it this way: it’s so airtight that I’ve never had . . . you know, I’ve never had a problem with this sort of thing.
BW: Let us ask this . . . .
DT: By the way, this man called me, he said, how is it that you don’t have — as famous as you are? And I sent him a copy of the agreement. He said, this is genius. And he now has people that go to work for him. I don’t like people that take your money and then say bad things about you. Okay? You know, they take your . . . .
RC: But it’s so different when you’re in the federal government.
DT: It’s different, I agree. It’s different.
RC: But you are recommending nondisclosure…
DT: And I tell you this, I will have to think about it. I will have to think about it. That’s a different thing, that I’m running a private company and I’m paying people lots of money, and then they go out and…
BW: The taxpayers are paying the other people in the federal government.
DT: Sure. Sure. They don’t do a great job, and then you fire them and they end up writing a book about you. So it’s different. But I will say that in the federal government it’s a different thing. So it’s something I would think about. But you know, I do right now — I have thousands and thousands of employees, many thousands, and every one of them has an agreement, has a . . . I call it a confidentiality . . . .
Bob Woodward: We are being had
Bob Costa & Bob Woodward: In the Republican Party there is a lot of angst and rage
Journalist Bob Woodward discusses President Trump’s relationship with the media and his rhetoric surrounding recent tragedies.
The roots of male rage, on show at the Kavanaugh hearing
American men do have genuine reasons for anxiety. The traditional jobs that many men have filled are disappearing, thanks to automation and outsourcing. The jobs that remain require, in most cases, higher education, which is increasingly difficult for non-affluent families to afford. We should indeed tremble for the future of both men and women in our country unless we address that problem, and related problems of declining health and well-being for working-class men.
.. Three emotions, all infused by fear, play a role in today’s misogyny. The most obvious is anger — at women making demands, speaking up, in general standing in the way of unearned male privilege. Women were once good mothers and good wives, props and supports for male ambition, the idea goes –but here they are asserting themselves in the workplace. Here they are daring to speak about their histories of sexual abuse at the hands of powerful men. It’s okay for women to charge strangers with rape, especially if the rapist is of inferior social status. But to dare to accuse the powerful is to assail a bastion of privilege to which men still cling.
.. Coupled with anger is envy. All over the world, women are seeing unprecedented success in higher education, holding a majority of university seats. In our nation many universities quietly practice affirmative action for males with inferior scores, to achieve a “gender balance” that is sometimes dictated by commitment to male sports teams, given Title IX’s mandate of proportional funding.
.. But men still feel that women are taking “their” places in college classes, in professional schools.
.. Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can’t hope to attain through hard work and emulation. Envy is the emotion of Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton”
.. And then, beneath the hysteria, lurks a more primitive emotion: disgust at women’s animal bodies.
.. In the United States, we observe this dynamic in racism, in homophobia and even in revulsion toward the bodies of people who are aging. But in every culture male disgust targets women, as emblems of bodily nature, symbolic animals by contrast to males, almost angels with pure minds.
.. Disgust for women’s bodily fluids is fully compatible with sexual desire. Indeed, it often singles out women seen as promiscuous, the repositories of many men’s fluids.
.. as with the apparent defamation of Renate Dolphin in Kavanaugh’s infamous yearbook, men often crow with pride over intercourse with a woman imagined as sluttish and at the same time defame and marginalize her.
.. Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.
.. Our president seems to be especially gripped by disgust: for women’s menstrual fluids, their bathroom breaks, the blood imagined streaming from their surgical incisions, even their flesh, if they are more than stick-thin.
Why Brett Kavanaugh Wasn’t Believable
Judge Kavanaugh, when it was his turn, was not laughing. He was yelling. He spent more than half an hour raging against Senate Democrats and the “Left” for “totally and permanently” destroying his name, his career, his family, his life. He called his confirmation process a “national disgrace.”
“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” Judge Kavanaugh said, sounding like someone who suddenly doubted his confirmation to the Supreme Court — an outcome that seemed preordained only a couple of weeks ago.
Judge Kavanaugh’s defiant fury might be understandable coming from someone who believes himself innocent of the grotesque charges he’s facing. Yet it was also evidence of an unsettling temperament in a man trying to persuade the nation of his judicial demeanor.
.. As he put it in his testimony, “What goes around, comes around,” in the partisan vortex that has been intensifying in Washington for decades now. His open contempt for the Democrats on the committee also raised further questions about his own fair-mindedness, and it served as a reminder of his decades as a Republican warrior who would take no prisoners.
.. He gave coy answers when pressed about what was clearly a sexual innuendo in his high-school yearbook.
He insisted over and over that others Dr. Blasey named as attending the gathering had “said it didn’t happen,” when in fact at least two of them have said only that they don’t recall it — and one of them told a reporter that she believes Dr. Blasey.
.. Judge Kavanaugh clumsily dodged a number of times when senators asked him about his drinking habits. When Senator Amy Klobuchar gently pressed him about whether he’d ever blacked out from drinking, he at first wouldn’t reply directly. “I don’t know, have you?” he replied — a condescending and dismissive response to the legitimate exercise of a senator’s duty of advise and consent. (Later, after a break in the hearing, he apologized.)
.. Judge Kavanaugh gave categorical denials a number of times, including, at other points, that he’d ever blacked out from too much drinking. Given numerous reports now of his heavy drinking in college, such a blanket denial is hard to believe.
.. then there’s the fact that she gains nothing by coming forward. She is in hiding now with her family in the face of death threats.
.. cowardice of the committee’s 11 Republicans, all of them men, and none of them, apparently, capable of asking Dr. Blasey a single question.
.. Eventually, as Judge Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators ventured out from behind their shield. Doubtless seeking to ape President’s Trump style and win his approval, they began competing with each other to make the most ferocious denunciation of their Democratic colleagues and the most heartfelt declaration of sympathy for Judge Kavanaugh, in a show of empathy far keener than they managed to muster for Dr. Blasey.
.. Pressed over and over by Democratic senators, Judge Kavanaugh never could come up with a clear answer for why he wouldn’t also want a fair, neutral F.B.I. investigation into the allegations against him — the kind of investigation the agency routinely performs, and that Dr. Blasey has called for. At one point, though, he acknowledged that it was common sense to put some questions to other potential witnesses besides him.
.. When Senator Patrick Leahy asked whether the judge was the inspiration for a hard-drinking character named Bart O’Kavanaugh in a memoir about teenage alcoholism by Mr. Judge, Judge Kavanaugh replied, “You’d have to ask him.”
Asking Mr. Judge would be a great idea. Unfortunately he’s hiding out in a Delaware beach town and Senate Republicans are refusing to subpoena him.
.. Why? Mr. Judge is the key witness in Dr. Blasey’s allegation. He has said he has no recollection of the party or of any assault. But he hasn’t faced live questioning to test his own memory and credibility. And Dr. Blasey is far from alone in describing Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge as heavy drinkers; several of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates have said the same.
.. If the committee will not make a more serious effort, the only choice for senators seeking to protect the credibility of the Supreme Court will be to vote no.