Woodward's 'Trump Tapes' Reveal a Weak and Tedious Watergate Writer Struggling for Headlines and Influence.

Bob Woodward isn't a rapacious reporter. In fact, the Trump Tapes were more like getting mauled by a dead sheep.

“The Great Bob Woodward!” former President Trump more than charitably explains to his wife Melania (which Woodward curiously pronounces “Mil-ay-knee-ah”) as she walks in on her husband during one of many telephone interviews with D.C.’s news armoire.

Woodward, 79, recently released just under 12 hours of audio (over 20 interviews), with President Trump, to appropriately diminutive fanfare.

The unavoidable, recurring thought that dominates while listening is, “Wow, Bob Woodward is not a very good interviewer.”

He’s slow, and boring, and struggles to remain focused. He gives advice, instead of seeking truth, and analyzes in real time, instead of doing actual news reporting. “Quelle surprise,” perhaps.

But the reason Bob Woodward is not a good interviewer isn’t because he is trying and failing. Bob Woodward is not a good interviewer because he’s not trying to be a good interviewer. He’s trying to prove a narrative confected in both his mind, and in the Kalorama cocktail parties he attends. And he can be effective at that.

How It Happened.

It’s evident, from early on, that the late Senator John McCain’s best friend, Lindsey Graham, has been the conduit for Trump giving so much of his work and personal time to being psychoanalyzed for the personal enrichment of Woodward, and for the pillaging of the historical record that the Washington Post man has become so integral to, on behalf of the D.C. set.

Throughout the interviews, Trump references the hatchet job Woodward did across the books: Bush at War, Plan of Attack, and State of Denial.

During the sluggish, repetitive interviews, Trump seemed increasingly concerned that Woodward was not out to allow the President his say, but rather to mock, ridicule, and implicate him across his books: Fear, Rage, and Peril.

In their final interview in 2020, Woodward almost totally comes clean that he was playing a character all along. Fake laughing at Trump’s jokes, agreeing with Trump’s boasts about his pre-COVID economy, and his achievements as one of the only peace-making presidents in modern history.

“It’s important to try to answer the question why Trump would agree to do these interview with me. One reason is that Lindsey Graham told Trump that he was confident I would not try to put words in Trump’s mouth, but would report accurately what was said.”

– Bob Woodward, The Trump Tapes

You will never manage to convince me that Lindsey Graham is not part of a persistent campaign to ruin Trump’s legacy on behalf of his disgraced and departed friend.

In a lot of ways, he continues to succeed.

Stand Out Moments.

“David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Obama’s president, I asked him at a breakfast – said ‘what do you think of Obama’ – and he said, ‘I like him, I love him, he’s so smart' – pause – ‘but no one is afraid of him’.”

– Bob Woodward, The Trump Tapes.

This was one of the only real stand out moments over the course of twelve hours of conversation, not simply because Woodward discloses this scarcely-reported comment to Trump in order to obviously elicit a scathing response about toughness, or the importance of fear (presumably to put on his book jacket), but also because of Trump’s response.

Instead of taking the bait and going in hard on Obama’s weakness on the world stage – a comfort zone for most conservative politicians – Trump pivots to his intellect: “I don’t think he’s smart, I think he’s highly overrated.”

The problem with Trump is, if you leave some dead air, he’ll fill it, and surely enough he continues on from his interesting counterpoint to Woodward’s premise by talking about how he went to all the best schools, yada yada yada.

This is a common refrain, as Woodward – far from his pledge to Lindsey Graham – does attempt to put words in Trump’s mouth for just about the entirety of their time together.

Whether discussing Black Lives Matter, the COVID-19 pandemic, or Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong-Un, the 12 hours is both a masterclass in how to not be a news reporter, but also in how to manipulate someone for the purposes of your own politics. That latter part was abundant on both sides.

Woodward’s obsession with North Korea is bizarre in itself. By the end of it, he spent almost a third of his time with the President asking about pictures with Kim Jong Un. It feels like he was trying to uncover something that simply wasn’t there, though it’s also unclear that this focus was Woodward’s alone. Given the preponderance of the “nuclear secrets at Mar a Lago” narrative, one wonders who was demanding Woodward probe in this direction.

Unafraid to filibuster, Trump dragged Woodward down winding roads, Abe Simpson-style. But the man whose entire career was built on the back of some bumbling political hacks making rookie errors at the Watergate Hotel will go to his grave fancying himself as a man who “asks the tough questions.”

It’s a good thing he’s never been responsible for the tough answers, no matter how much he tries.

Foreign Policy.

By this point you will stop being surprised that Woodward’s political philosophy could fit across a CNN chyron. And not those angry, two-tiered ones they deployed during the Trump admin.

On Ukraine, Woodward blithely asserts that Vladimir Putin destroyed the nation’s buffer status through his invasion of early 2022. In reality, that buffer was erased long before, by a decade of NATO and European Union meddling.

Whatever you think of the war, Putin didn’t stop Ukraine being a buffer state. Woodward’s absurd analysis calls into question everything else he asserts.

Still, at this point in the interviews it is amazing to hear how Trump was his own best defender during the first impeachment. Handily recalling facts about Joe Biden’s own “quid pro quos,” as well as his conversations with Volodymyr Zelensky, no amount of Woodward demanding Trump make a national apology would shake the President. And Woodward did, in fact, demand, at one point even telling the President to take a walk around the White House with his daughter Ivanka, asking for her guidance on the wording of such an apology.

“If I’m wrong, I believe in apologizing. This was a totally appropriate conversation.”

– President Donald J. Trump, The Trump Tapes

“You’re Job. You’re Job from the Bible, do you realize that?” Woodward said to Trump, before dubbing over his own interview, claiming he was telling the President that “ironically”.

Such a weasel.

Post-Game.

This is a common feature in Woodward’s tapes, by the way.

Instead of allowing the conversations to stand on their own merits, and allowing the listener to determine their own conclusions, Woodward adopts the age-old narrative-peddling tactic of placing “context” and commentary over his own interviews. It’s weasel-like, and it sounds weasel-like.

But whether or not Woodward knows this about himself or even cares is anyone’s guess.

Quick to cast judgment and aspersions on Trump and his other interview subjects, Woodward hesitates not – over the course of his conversations with Trump – to lobby for lying bureaucrats like Antony Fauci, or extremist groups like Black Lives Matter and AntiFa.

At one point in the tapes, he even says, “there are no Marxists left” in America, in an attempt to force Trump to change his public tune on the rioters trying to burn down American cities.

Conclusion.

In truth, the Trump Tapes give a tepid and embarrassing insight into America’s long-crumbled journalistic institutions; Trump’s persistent naivety in dealing with the forces trying to assail him; and the pointlessness of entering into “good faith” interviews with doddery has-beens desperately trying to crowbar a headline or a news hook from their latest bête noire.

The only redeeming feature of the whole thing for Donald Trump is that far from being mauled by a rapacious reporter searching for the truth, the Trump Tapes sound more like what Denis Healey once described as “being savaged by a dead sheep.”