The president imagined that he could do unto Woodward as Woodward was doing unto him.
A Bob Woodward book is a record of a sequence of transactions. In exchange for access and information, Woodward offers Washington power holders the opportunity to disparage their rivals and aggrandize themselves. But be warned that a Woodward proposition is never guaranteed. It comes hedged with dense, finely printed terms and conditions. And Woodward’s scoops have a way of turning out to be less new than they are first advertised.
Shrewd Washington players understand the risks of a deal with Woodward and negotiate their contracts carefully. The classic example is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan gave access to Woodward in the late 1990s and collected a handsome return in the form of an adulatory book, unironically titled Maestro. The book concludes with lavish praise:
Although his words are almost unbearably opaque, he appears to be doing something rare—telling the truth. The very act of thinking, the strain in his wrinkled forehead, can be seen in the video footage of him before the microphone. At times it seems painful. But the public has rewarded his caution, reflection and the results with their confidence. That he is the unelected steward of the economy is simply accepted. … With Greenspan, we find comfort.
That’s the reward that can be extracted by those who know their business—the prize for the canny and effective. It’s the prize Donald Trump hungered for and that Woodward dangled in front of him at the beginning of the Trump era. Woodward was spotted headed into Trump Tower on January 3. Two weeks later, he appeared on TV to entice Trump with a mouthwatering bid: validation of Trump’s accusations of an FBI plot against him. That day, Woodward made a rare non-book-promoting TV appearance on Trump’s favorite network. Speaking to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, Woodward poured ferocious scorn on the Steele dossier, which had been recently published by BuzzFeed. Trump immediately tweeted his gratitude. “Thank you to Bob Woodward who said, ‘That is a garbage document…it never should have been presented…Trump’s right to be upset (angry)…”
Despite the thank-you tweet, Woodward’s hopes for early access to Trump were disappointed—a fact Woodward communicated in September 2018 by releasing an audiotape of a conversation with the president from the month before. Bob Woodward: I’m sorry we missed the opportunity to talk for the book.
Donald Trump: Well, I just spoke with Kellyanne [Conway], and she asked me if I got a call. I never got a call. I never got a message. Who did you ask about speaking to me? … I’ll speak to Kellyanne. I am a little surprised that she wouldn’t have told me. In fact, she just walked in. He said that he told you.
Kellyanne Conway: Yes.
Trump: About speaking to me. But you never told me. Why didn’t you tell me?
Conway: [Inaudible.]
Trump: I would’ve been very happy to speak to him. All right, so what are you going to do?
Part of the art of the deal with Woodward is that it’s dangerous to sell a “yes” too cheaply, but there may also be a price to pay for an outright “no.” Woodward preserved in Fear the trajectory of his disillusionment with Conway. He writes about her in glowing terms on pages 16 through 18, more neutrally on pages 24 and 25; belittles her on page 36; and then drops her from most of the remainder of the book. He tells one negative story after another about the president, culminating in the book’s final assessment, a quote from Trump’s then–personal lawyer, John Dowd: “[He’s] a fucking liar.”
Yet in retrospect, it’s evident that Woodward was still bargaining with Trump. Fear was nowhere near as harsh a book as it could have been. On Trump’s central concern from 2017 to 2018, the investigation into whether his campaign had colluded with Russia, Woodward published unchallenged the arguments of Dowd and others that the whole matter was a hoax. Dowd’s quote about the president lying was embedded in a long defense of Trump, a verbatim transcript that fills much of the final chapter of the book.
But as Woodward continued his negotiation, he also apparently revised his assessment of his negotiating partner. Back in 2017, Woodward seems to have believed that with Trump he was doing business with a savvy customer like Greenspan. Hence, Woodward’s endorsement of Trump’s denials of Russian influence—although on that topic, Woodward may also have succumbed to “Not invented here” syndrome, the temptation to dismiss stories he hadn’t himself uncovered. As he commenced discussions on a second book, however, Woodward evidently realized that he was dealing with a chump, a sucker, a patsy, a galoot—the schmendrick of all schmendricks. In the end, Trump gave much, and got nothing.
Trump had absorbed the light slapping of Fear and concluded that if only he had spoken with Woodward, he could have coaxed him into more flattery. As Peter Baker reported in The New York Times:
The president did not speak with him for Fear, Mr. Woodward’s first book on Mr. Trump published in 2018, a decision that the president blamed on his staff and regretted because he believed he could have made the account more positive. As a result, Mr. Trump decided early on to cooperate with Rage, to be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, reasoning that he would be able to better shape the narrative.
Trump did not understand that you do not reason with Woodward. You haggle with him, then you work him. You also must understand the risks. Woodward will adhere to the strict letter of any agreement. But if you think there is some unspoken understanding of favorable treatment beyond the strict letter, you will be rudely awakened, just as President George W. Bush was rudely awakened when Woodward followed two laudatory volumes—Bush at War and Plan of Attack—with the harshly critical State of Denial. Presidents talk with Woodward hoping to sway public opinion about their administrations. Their mistake is not understanding that Woodward does not sway conventional opinion. He is swayed by conventional opinion. So long as that is with you, Woodward is with you. Let that turn against you, and Woodward will turn.
Trump instead imagined that he could do unto Woodward as Woodward was doing unto him: flatter him into compliance. As Baker further reported: During his first interview with Mr. Woodward for the book last December, aides tried to end it after a while, but the president brushed them off. ‘Go ahead,’ he said to Mr. Woodward. ‘I find it interesting. I love this guy. Even though he writes shit about me.’
Trump was only towel-snapping with that comment. Deep into 2019 and well into 2020, Trump deluded himself that he had found a potent media ally in Woodward. He tweeted in October 2019, “Good job, I must say, by Bob Woodward on ‘Deface the Nation.’ The CBS no name host(ess), and other guest, Peter Baker of The Failing New York Times, were totally biased, boring and wrong (as usual), but Woodward was cool, calm and interesting. Thank you Bob!
Not until August did it occur to Trump that he, the nation’s con artist in chief, had been out-conned. In fact, he had conned himself. He tweeted:
“About the only way a person is able to write a book on me is if they agree that it will contain as much bad ‘stuff’ as possible, much of which is lies. It’s like getting a job with CNN or MSDNC and saying that ‘President Trump is great.’ You have ZERO chance. FAKE NEWS!
“..Even whether it’s dumb warmongers like John Bolton, social pretenders like Bob Woodward, who never has anything good to say, or an unstable niece, who was now rightfully shunned, scorned and mocked her entire life, and never even liked by her own very kind & caring grandfather!”
And again, after the first reports on the book were published:
For years Fake stories and investigations, then the phony Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, next Ukraine and the failed Impeachment, now the crummy Atlantic Magazine’s MADE UP STORY, and lastly, the political hit job by rapidly fading Bob Woodward and his boring book. It never ends!
As the initial reports on Rage whipped up a firestorm of controversy, Trump added:
Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months. If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!
But all too late.
For what it’s worth, I believe that there is much less than meets the eye to the most headline-grabbing quote in Rage: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
As recorded, that reads like a cold-blooded confession that Trump intentionally concealed deadly knowledge at a time—February and March—when that knowledge could have saved lives. But you can reach that conclusion only if you believe that Trump knows things the way fully rational people know them: as statements about reality that exist independently from the speaker. Trump’s mind does not work that way. He does not observe the world and then use words to describe it. He speaks the words he wishes you to believe, and then trusts the world to conform to his wishes.
Understanding Trump’s indifference to fact supplies the answer to the question that most puzzled me when I first heard Trump’s self-damning COVID-19 quotes to Woodward. The earliest of those comes from February 7, fully three weeks before the first documented COVID-19 death in the United States on February 28. If Trump understood on February 7 how dangerous the coronavirus was, why didn’t he do something about it? It’s at least rational to cover up a scandal or a crime. A pandemic cannot be covered up. If Trump understood the lethality, he could have acted in time to protect—not the country, because there’s little evidence he cares about that—but himself. Yet he did not. But despite the hashtag #TrumpKnew, Trump did not actually know anything. He said things to meet the need of the fleeting moment. In February, the need of the moment was to levitate the stock market. By mid-March, the need of the moment was to sound smart, aware, in the know. Two days before Trump’s headline-grabbing quote to Woodward, on March 17, Trump said virtually the same thing at a televised press conference. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Woodward did not unearth some big scoop. Trump simply repeated for Woodward the same I knew all about it better than anybody message that Trump had already placed on the public record.
That’s the weird thing about the Trump era. The biggest scandals occur in full public view. When Trump takes bribes, he does so in a huge building on Pennsylvania Avenue with his name on the door. When Trump directs public money to his own businesses, he invites the press corps along to record him doing it. When Trump solicits Russian help against his political opponents, he shouts the ask on live TV. And when Trump admits that he lied about the coronavirus, he admits it in real time, again on television.
The young Woodward earned his fame connecting Richard Nixon to the Watergate break-in of June 1972. If Trump had ordered that crime, he’d have bragged about it on TV the very next day, insisted he was smart to do it, that the Democrats had always done worse, and that he was the real victim. The burglars would have posed for selfies inside the office in Trump-Pence 2020 sweatshirts and called into Hannity to cackle about their caper.
We saw it all happen! The president not only told everybody at the time—he bragged about it at the time. We are surprised only because we forgot what we ourselves witnessed. There’s something quite brilliant in how Woodward and his publishers can use our amnesia for their marketing. But there is something very unbrilliant, indeed ominously dangerous, in the inability of the American public and even the American media to remember crimes and scandals that they witnessed in every last detail as they happened.
Lupita Nyong’o: Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein
he informed me that we would be having lunch at a restaurant before getting to his home. I did not think much of this. It was a busy restaurant, and as soon as we sat down he ordered a vodka and diet soda for himself. I asked for a juice. Harvey was unimpressed with my choice and told the waiter to bring me a vodka and diet soda instead. I declined and said I wanted the juice. We went back and forth until finally he turned to the waiter and said, “Get her what I tell you to get her. I’m the one paying the bill.” I smiled and remained silent. The waiter left and returned with a vodka and diet soda for me. He placed it on the table beside my water. I drank the water. Harvey told me that I needed to drink the vodka and diet soda. I informed him that I would not.
“Why not?” I remember him asking. “Because I don’t like vodka, and I don’t like diet soda, and I don’t like them together,” I said. “You are going to drink that,” he insisted. I smiled again and said that I wouldn’t. He gave up and called me stubborn. I said, “I know.” And the meal proceeded without much further ado. In this second encounter with Harvey, I found him to be pushy and idiosyncratic more than anything.
.. he insisted I go with him, laying down the law as though I too was one of his children.
.. I was after all on his premises, and the members of his household, the potential witnesses, were all (strategically, it seems to me now) in a soundproof room.
.. He responded with exactly the words I needed to hear: Come with whomever you want to come with. And so I invited two of my trusted male friends.
.. My friends had been equally charmed by Harvey. He knew when to turn it on if he wanted something. He was definitely a bully, but he could be really charming, which was disarming and confusing. I left feeling that perhaps he had learned my boundaries and was going to respect them.
.. I was expecting that it would be a group of us, as it had been for the reading, but she informed me it would just be Mr. Weinstein. She would sit with me until he arrived. She seemed on edge, but I could only imagine how stressful it was to work for a man who had so much going on.
.. Harvey arrived and the assistant immediately disappeared.
.. Again he was offended by my nonalcoholic beverage choice but he didn’t fight me on it as hard.
.. Before the starters arrived, he announced: “Let’s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal.” I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant. He told me not to be so naïve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.
.. I mustered up the courage to politely decline his offer. “You have no idea what you are passing up,” he said. “With all due respect, I would not be able to sleep at night if I did what you are asking, so I must pass,” I replied.
.. “I just want to know that we are good,” I said.
“I don’t know about your career, but you’ll be fine,” he said. It felt like both a threat and a reassurance at the same time; of what, I couldn’t be sure.
.. I was in Toronto for the premiere of “12 Years a Slave,” the first feature film I was in. At an after-party, he found me and evicted whoever was sitting next to me to sit beside me.
.. I turned down the role, but Harvey would not take no for an answer. While at Cannes, he insisted on meeting with me in person. I agreed to do it only because my agent would be present.
.. He said he was open to making it bigger, more significant, maybe they could add a love scene. He said if I did this one for him, he would do another one for me — basically guaranteeing backing a star-vehicle film for me. I ran out of ways of politely saying no and so did my agent
.. But I also did not know that there was a world in which anybody would care about my experience with him.
.. He was one of the first people I met in the industry, and he told me, “This is the way it is.”
.. everyone seemed to be bracing themselves and dealing with him, unchallenged.
.. I did not know that anybody wanted things to change. So my survival plan was to avoid Harvey and men like him at all costs, and I did not know that I had allies in this.
.. all the projects I have been a part of have had women in positions of power, along with men who are feminists in their own right who have not abused their power
.. combating the shame we go through that keeps us isolated and allows for harm to continue
.. stay vigilant and ensure that the professional intimacy is not abused
.. I hope we can form a community where a woman can speak up about abuse and not suffer another abuse by not being believed and instead being ridiculed. That’s why we don’t speak up — for fear of suffering twice