Bob Woodward’s recorded excerpts of his conversations with Donald Trump take listeners back to 2020, and make clear just how much of the White House’s fumbling response to Covid-19 came from the president himself.
“I feel good. I think we’re doing a great job. I think we’ll never get credit from the fake news media no matter how good a job we do. No matter how good a job I do, I will never get credit from the media, and I’ll never get credit from Democrats who want to beat me desperately in seven months,” Trump told Woodward in an early April interview, days after the economy had shut down to unsuccessfully stop the spread of a virus that would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans that year alone.
Trump’s denialism continued into July: “It’s flaring up all over the world, Bob. By the way, all over the world. That was one thing I noticed last week. You know they talk about this country. All over the world, it’s flaring up. But we have it under control.”
Later that month, he insisted that he would soon release a plan to fight the virus, but appeared to tie its timing to how it would affect his election chances. “I’ve got 106 days. That’s a long time. You know, if I put out a plan now, people won’t even remember it in a hundred — I won the last election in the last week.”
While Woodward agrees with many other observers of the former president that his attempts to overturn the 2020 election make him a danger to democracy, he also makes the case to listeners that Trump didn’t even fully understand how to do his job – and the nation paid the price.
“Trump reminds how easy it is to break things you do not understand — democracy and the presidency,” Woodward concludes.
Key events
‘Trump is an unparalleled danger’ reporter warns after hours of interviews with ex-president
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has released more excerpts from his interviews with Donald Trump in 2020, and closes with this warning: “Trump is an unparalleled danger.” Describing him as “overwhelmed by the job” while in office as Covid-19 spread across the United States, Woodward warns that Trump continues to pursue “a seditious conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election – and end democracy itself. While Woodward is far from the first person to say that, the journalist’s opinion is uniquely informed, given that the two men spoke 20 times during the last year of his presidency.
Here’s a look at what’s happening today:
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Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis will face his Democratic challenger Charlie Crist for the only debate of the election at 7pm ET.
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Joe Biden will hold a rally today at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at 1pm.
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Poll tracker FiveThirtyEight downgraded Democrats’ chances of keeping control of the Senate over the weekend, lowering it to 55% amid a wave of polls that signal several of its candidates may be in trouble.