Washington
CNN
—
During a December 2019 Oval Office interview with then-President Donald Trump, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward asked if his belligerent rhetoric toward North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was intended to lead Kim to the negotiating table.
“No. No. It was designed for some reason, it was designed. Who knows? Instinctively. Let’s talk instinct, okay?” Trump said. going to happen. But that was very crude rhetoric. The hardest part.
Trump then asked his aides to show Woodward his photos with Kim at the DMZ. “It’s me and him. That’s the line, right? Then I crossed the line. Pretty cool. You know? Pretty cool. Right?” said the president.
Trump’s take on his relationship with Kim — and his admission that he didn’t have a broader strategy behind his threats of having a “much bigger” nuclear button — are part of a new audiobook Woodward is releasing. Titled “The Trump Tapes,” the book contains the 20 interviews Woodward conducted with Trump from 2016 to 2020.
CNN obtained a copy of the audiobook ahead of its Oct. 25 release, which includes more than eight hours of the reporter’s raw interviews with Trump interspersed with Woodward’s commentary.
The interviews offer unvarnished insight into the former president’s worldview and are the most comprehensive recordings of Trump speaking about his presidency – including explaining his reason for meeting Kim, his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Trump’s detailed views on America’s nuclear arsenal. The audio also shows how Trump decided to share with Woodward the letters Kim wrote to him — the letters that helped spark the DOJ’s investigation into classified documents Trump brought to Mar-a-Lago.
“And don’t say I gave them to you, okay?” Trump told Woodward.
Woodward said in the book’s introduction that he was releasing the recordings in part because “hearing Trump speak is a completely different experience from reading the transcripts or listening to snippets of interviews on television or the Internet. “.
He describes Trump as “crude, profane, divisive and misleading. His language is often retaliatory.
“Yet you will also hear him engaging and entertaining, laughing, always the host. He’s trying to convince me, to sell me his presidency. The full-time salesman,” Woodward said. “I wanted to put as many of Trump’s voices, his own words, out there for the historical record and for people to hear and judge and make their own assessments.”
Most of the interviews were conducted for Woodward’s second book on Trump, ‘Rage’, which revealed that Trump told Woodward on February 7, 2020 that Covid-19 was a ‘deadly thing’, but that he has always downplayed publicly.
While the blockbuster revelations were published in Woodward’s book, the audio clips from the interviews are a stark reminder of how Trump acted as president and provide a candid look at Trump’s thinking and motivations as he he’s gearing up for another potential run at the White House in 2024.
In the interviews, Trump shares his views on the strongmen he admires – including Kim, Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and reveals his general belief that he is the smartest person in the room.
In a June 2020 interview, which followed nationwide protests against George Floyd, Woodward asked Trump if he had help writing his speech in which Trump declared himself the “president of law and justice.” ‘order”.
“I receive, I receive people. They come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. The ideas are mine,” Trump told Woodward in a June 2020 interview. “You want to know something? Everything is mine. You know everything. Every part of it.
The 20 interviews contained in the audiobook begin in March 2016, when Woodward and his then Washington Post colleague Robert Costa interviewed Trump while he was a presidential candidate. The rest of the interviews were conducted in 2019 and 2020.
In the December 2019 interview, Woodward asked Trump about North Korea’s nuclear program, prompting the president to brag about US nuclear weapons capabilities while seemingly revealing a new – and likely highly classified – weapons system. -, which was one of the most uplifting episodes of “Rage.”
Woodward says he was never able to establish what Trump was referring to, though he notes that Trump’s comment reaffirmed the “glib and dangerous way” the former president handled classified information.
“I built a weapon system that no one in this country has had before,” Trump told Woodward. “We have things you haven’t even seen or heard of. We have things that Putin and Xi have never heard of before.
Throughout the talks, Trump refers to his relationship with Putin, blaming the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference of ruining his chances of improving relations between the two countries.
“I love Putin. Our relationship should be very good. I campaigned to get along with Russia, China and everyone,” Trump said in a January 2020 interview. Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing, okay? Mainly because they have 1,332 fucking nuclear warheads.
In a rare moment of self-reflection, Trump noted that he had better relationships with leaders “the tougher and meaner they are.”
“I get on very well with Erdogan, even though you’re not supposed to because everyone says what a horrible guy. But you know for me it works well,” Trump said in a January 2020 interview.
“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know?” He continued. “Explain that to me one day, okay. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. The easiest are the ones that I maybe don’t like as much or get along with as much.
Woodward’s audiobook also includes never-before-seen interviews with Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien, his deputy Matthew Pottinger, and behind-the-scenes audio with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
During a call with Woodward in February 2020, Trump hands over the phone to Kushner to arrange interviews with other Trump advisers.
“What I heard from the president is basically that I’m working for you now, so I’ll make myself available around that time and make sure I get you a good roster,” Kushner said.
“I want you to know that I have no illusions that you work for me. I know you work for Ivanka, don’t you? Woodward joked.
Kushner laughed. “Ok, okay, you get it. You get it. That’s probably why you’re Bob Woodward. That’s right.”
Throughout the recordings, a cast of Trump advisers, allies and family members — including Donald Trump Jr., Melania Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Hope Hicks and others — can be heard back- plan. The audio gives an inside look at Trump’s inner circle, such as a 2016 exchange when Trump was asked if he expected government employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, and his son is intervened.
“I won’t get next week’s paycheck until I sign one,” joked Donald Trump Jr.
In the epilogue to “The Trump Tapes,” Woodward says his own critical past assessments of Trump’s presidency didn’t go far enough. In “Rage,” Woodward wrote, “Trump is the wrong person for the job.”
Now, says Woodward, “Trump is an unprecedented danger. The record now shows that Trump led – and continues to lead – a seditious plot to nullify the 2020 election, which is in fact an effort to destroy democracy.