The scene takes place in March 2016, at the start of the election campaign that brought Donald Trump to power. To everyone’s surprise.
Sitting in a conference room of the Trump International Hotel then under construction on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, a stone’s throw from the White House, the journalist from washington post Bob Woodward, who became a legend for uncovering the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, reviews past presidencies with the populist.
“Why did Nixon fail? he asks his interlocutor. “Because of you,” replies Donald Trump, laughing. ” Nope. He was responsible for his own destiny,” retorts the journalist. A destiny accelerated by “the Republican Party, itself, which ended up distancing itself from him”, he adds.
A few days before the midterm elections in the United States, on which the ousted ex-president still imposes his mark, the investigative journalist decided to invite himself into the campaign last week by broadcasting The Trump Tapes. Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump. The audio book of more than 11 hours brings together around twenty interviews carried out with the Republican before and during his presidency. The title refers to the “White House Tapes”, recordings of conversations in the Oval Office that helped bring down Nixon.
Raw, filled with anger, resentment toward Democrats and the media, and surreal commentary on the populist’s handling of both the COVID-19 crisis and the country’s foreign policies, these “Trump Tapes,” do not incriminate the ex-president, unlike those of the Nixon era.
But, in the end, they trace the contours of a man inclined to distort reality in order to better feed his rage, whom Woodward called, in the conclusion of his book fear, of “unfit” for the office of President of the United States. In 2022, the journalist now goes further in conclusion to his audio book. “Trump is an unprecedented danger,” he said. The facts now show that[il] led, and continues to lead, a seditious plot to overturn the 2020 elections, which is in fact an effort to destroy democracy. »
“The documentary value of these recordings is arguably lower than those of the White House [sous Nixon]commented in an interview with To have to jurist Joshua Dressler, professor emeritus of law at Ohio State University and specialist in Watergate. At the time, there was much less solid evidence of Nixon’s involvement in Watergate until the tapes were discovered and made public. Today we have a lot of information about [les crimes et malversations que Trump est soupçonné d’avoir commis]. Hearing his voice adds power to these files, but without being as powerful as in Nixon’s day. »
Kim Jong-un and COVID-19
In the ears, this voice is heard, for example, to praise the “great relationship” he has developed with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, whose ex-president praises the intelligence to Woodward by speaking without stops the “fantastic letters” that the leader of one of the most closed countries in the world sent him.
When asked by the reporter to detail his conversations with Kim Jong-un, Trump said:
“He talked about his pimple on his desk [pour déclencher une attaque nucléaire]. I told him that my button was bigger than his and that mine worked. Something like that,” he said from the Oval Office.
And “why did you insist on meeting him”, asks the journalist? “It was made for… who knows?” It was done by instinct”, without strategy, without vision, which frightened his national security advisers at the time. Trump’s attempt to denuclearize North Korea never succeeded.
On the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump spends his time posing as a victim, of China, of the media that does not understand him, while claiming “to be the only one” to have made the right decisions to face the threat .
We learn that, as early as January, he knew he was going to have to face “the greatest threat in terms of security”, his advisers had told him. In the face of these alerts, he never developed a plan, even going so far as to tell Woodward that he did not want to do so at the time, because “nobody would have remembered it in the election”. presidential election which arrived nine months later. More than 400,000 Americans have lost their lives due to the coronavirus.
“The electorate that follows him shouldn’t be troubled by these recordings,” says political scientist Marc Selverstone of the University of Virginia. The polls confirm a great stability of his base, regardless of what he says and the incendiary nature of his remarks. »
“Trump treated his presidency as his property,” Woodward says in the book. Everything is mine. And I do what I want. If he returns in 2024, he will settle accounts. »
And the attack on the Capitol by his supporters, the misguided claims he continues to make about the theft of the 2020 election, the secret documents he illegally keeps at his Mar-a-Lago residence, just like these tapes, probably won’t change anything.
“In August 2022, Trump had a larger group of supporters, loyalists and fundraisers than any other politician in the country. He has an incomparable political machine, surpassing that of Joe Biden, ”concludes the investigative journalist.
Speaking to Fox News, the ex-president called Woodward “very sordid” after the audiobook was released and threatened to sue her. Not for any inaccuracies contained in these Trump Tapesbut because he also considers himself the owner of these bands and wants to benefit from the income too.
This report was funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund–The duty.