There’s an irony in the predictably wide-eyed response of Donald Trump’s camp to War, the new book by veteran political journalist Bob Woodward. Via a statement attributed to Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung, Woodward is accused of suffering from a “debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
As ever, to summarise the statement — to remove its tautologies and brittle, meandering sentences — would be a misleading distortion. Here it is in full:
None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Woodward is an angry, little man and is clearly upset because President Trump is successfully suing him because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously. President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book that either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue. Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality.
Of course, as we noted at the time of his last Trump book, Woodward is probably the highest-profile journalist least susceptible to TDS. It took him until September 2020 to conclude, with a heavy heart, that Trump might not be quite up to the job of president. It was a huge statement from Woodward, who is otherwise committed to chronicling powerful people via “self-portraits“.
So what’s in the book that’s got Trump so steamed?
Trump and Putin are besties
Russian President Vladimir Putin was famously scared of contracting COVID-19, putting foreign leaders at the other end of a comically long table and putting visitors through a “disinfection tunnel” before they could meet with him. Luckily he had his faithful lickspittle Trump in office, who, according to Woodward, dutifully sent the autocrat some COVID-19 tests, which at the time were vanishingly limited in supply.
By the book’s account, Putin said to Trump, “Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” and Trump replied, “I don’t care. Fine.”
This is during the pandemic that, largely thanks to Trump’s indifference, denial and mismanagement, took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Further, Woodward reports that Trump and Putin continued to speak long after Trump left office (and during the small matter of Putin launching an invasion into Ukraine). This isn’t just morally dubious, it’s potentially illegal; the Logan Act prohibits private diplomacy. Not that violating it is necessarily any barrier to high esteem in Washington.
The Trump-Woodward history
Of course, it took 18 interviews and a book to promote for Woodward to have his first moment of clarity regarding Trump’s fitness for office. His September 2020 book Rage claimed Trump knew how dangerous COVID-19 was as early as February that year, even while he and his administration downplayed the threat. Further, Woodward said he acquired 27 “love letters” Trump had exchanged with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and that Trump’s cabinet had described him as “dangerous” and without a “moral compass”.
Trump, furious that one of the most famous political journalists had recorded their frequent conversations and then made them public, sued Woodward in January 2023. The case is ongoing.
What else is in the book?
Let’s not allow accusations of Trump’s cosiness with a dictator crowd out the real story: Joe Biden allegedly engaging in the language of the snooker hall when describing world leaders. According to point number two on The Washington Post’s list of five “key revelations” from War, “Biden called Putin the ‘epitome of evil’ and remarked to his advisers, about his Russian counterpart, ‘That fucking Putin.'”
And if that weren’t enough, he apparently called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “son of a bitch” and “a bad fucking guy!”
It’s a perfect distillation of the disjuncture between the world Trump inhabits and the genteel standards of the Washington that Woodward describes — summed up with characteristic pith by Joan Didion in the following terms:
Washington, as rendered by Woodward, is by definition basically solid, a diorama of decent intentions in which wise if misunderstood and occasionally misled stewards will reliably prevail.
