America’s insatiable addiction to celebrity is a big reason Donald Trump became president. Sad as that is, there’s at least a grim cause and effect logic about it. What’s just so hard to fathom is that Trump can’t control this tendency in himself to even the slightest degree, even for self-protection, even viz-a-viz a demigod of the news media he claims to loathe so much. His self-regard and his awe of fame are so powerful and intertwined that even after Bob Woodward wrote one unsparing, embarrassing book about his presidency (Fear, 2018), Trump decided what he really needed to do was speak with Woodward on the record. Regularly. Be assured, Bob Woodward is far more than a celebrity. He’s a great journalist and a legitimate historic figure. But Trump’s infatuation doesn’t stem from Woodward’s accomplishments. It’s because Woodward’s on TV, a lion of DC and the chronicler of presidents, and Trump is the best president ever. Trump craved Bob Woodward’s validation so much that he seems to have come to think of him as his confessor. And now we have the first tapes. And they are, no matter how much we already know about Trump’s mendacity, stunning.
“This is deadly stuff,” he said of Covid-19. “You just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed,” he said. “I wanted to always play it down,” he said in February and March of 2020, when he had high-level intelligence and before the rest of us knew what we were up against. Yet to the we the people, he said it was no big deal, all taken care of. And with these revelations we can lay to rest the lingering possibility that Trump was just incapable of grasping the truth or willfully resistant to intelligence sources he mistrusts. He knew full well what we faced and covered it up, badly, which is kind of how he rolls. The old rhyming chestnut isn’t a stretch or hyperbole in this case: Trump lied. Thousands died. As grave and criminal as that is, it’s still somehow easier to understand than Trump’s confidence that he could outsmart Woodward.
There’s this dude in Nashville who I once knew briefly as the husband of a friend. Then I knew him as her ex-husband because he was emotionally abusive. Then I knew him as a protege of and media producer for a right wing radio host, a Trump troll in training. So he pops up in my Facebook timeline a few weeks back, and while I planned to skim by, his post was a robust defense of Trump’s handling of the virus. It was fatuous and deluded, pure misinformation. So just to have it on the record for anyone who saw this thread, I wrote as much briefly and moved on. He of course came back. What could he have done better? I left that one alone. My time is too precious. But I mean, come on. It’s the same thing that debilitated this presidency before it began. He’s a fabulist. If Steve Jobs deployed a “reality distortion field” to get his way, as his biographer Walter Isaacson described, Trump’s RDF is a cheap knock off, effective only on the feeble minded. I mean, Trump didn’t just mis-speak the first time he said we’d have fewer US cases of Covid if we did fewer tests. He kept repeating it. He believes this. He lies to no one more comprehensively than he does to himself.
This would have ended him years ago were he not backed by a squad of lying lie amplifiers. Sean Hannity said Wednesday night: “Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, President Trump has never misled or distorted the truth about this deadly disease.” White House spokesninny Kaleigh McEnany said precisely the same thing today from the people’s podium. How does it even feel to have such stark and hysterical untruth come out of one’s head hole and into a TV camera? I’ll never know. In Hannity’s case, I suppose the money numbs the pain. McEnany is banking on future paydays for her slavish loyalty now, but I don’t think it’s going to work out for her as she dreams.
Some are asking, and it’s a good question, if Woodward or the Post behaved unethically in withholding these revelations for months as the pandemic raged. I’m open to arguments, but I believe that it is appropriate for a news organization to commit to a variety of reporting strategies on its subject matter, a short game and long game, if you will. The Post has a phalanx of reporters on the White House beat getting everything they can out there on a daily basis. Woodward has a different job. His information gathering strategy is premised on not turning a phone interview into a story the next day and on building a web of seduction. It’s an arrangement like agreeing to protect a source. Without it, the candor doesn’t happen. Moreover, in a book, the truth can be contextualized and considered against a ton of other evidence, making it more high impact. It’s more vetted and more authoritative in the flow of history. Also, we have to consider in this case that often Trump’s words are really quite meaningless. Woodward had a right and obligation to get back and back on the phone with Trump to see how his remarks changed or didn’t change, to test if what he thought he heard him saying was truly his truth. This is all vastly more impactful by having sifted and considered a series of conversations and events. It set a trap that no daily reporter could set, and Trump walked right into it.
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I find the commentary that Woodward is some how “at fault” in his handling of the information rather ludicrous. Like anybody who might have taken a different course is going to listen to Bob Woodward? Jeezus, people, get a grip. Of course, the most vehement of these “commentators” are... wait for it... Facebookers. So consider the source. I’d link them to your thoughts here but, you know.... why bother?
Thank you, Craig. As always, I learned from and am challenged by your keen insights. In this case, I do confess to struggling with the question of why Woodward sat on these tapes for months and months, as people died and lies and chaos romped. (Please don’t mistake this for a version of Trump’s own narcissistic and self-serving question.)