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      Collision of Power review: Marty Baron on Bezos, the Post and Trump

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      Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. All told, newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 of them at the Post. Liev Schreiber portrayed him in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar-winning movie that depicted a Boston Globe investigation of sexual predation by priests.Baron has stories to tell. His first book has a tantalizing subtitle – Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post – and he dives right in.In August 2013, “five days after the announcement that Bezos would buy the Post, Trump heaped praise on both Bezos and the paper”, Baron recalls.“I think it’s a great move for him, I think it’s great for the Washington Post,” Trump remarked. Beyond that, Trump, then a mere reality TV star, called Bezos “amazing” and proclaimed that he was a “fan” of the paper.Trump soon fell out of love. In December 2015, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he accused Bezos and Amazon of scamming the American taxpayer. In March 2018, as president, he began hammering away at the supposed Amazon “post office scam”. But the deference Trump demanded never arrived.Baron’s book is timely. Last month, Trump barked that Comcast, owner of NBC and MSNBC, should be investigated for “treason”, and will be if he is re-elected next year.His Republican opponents offered no pushback. This was not a surprise. During his first presidential run, and then as president, Trump repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people”, treating reporters as foils. To Baron, that echoed Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Goebbels. Threats of violence against the press wafted through campaign rallies. In late October 2016, in Miami, Trump whipped a crowd into a frenzy against Katy Tur of MSNBC. On Twitter, death threats circulated like “loose trash”, she recalled.Baron writes: “The middle finger he had given the press was about to become a fist. My own mood was one of stoic acceptance.” Throughout his book, his tone is measured and concerned, not simply alarmed. He calls for objectivity but he knows the press is under attack. Nationally, investigative journalism thrives. Locally, it dies.This being a Trump book, Baron also deals some dish. According to Baron, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, tried to oust him from the Post.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. “In December 2019, Kushner would lean on [the Post publisher Fred] Ryan to withdraw support for me and our Russia investigation. ‘He aims to get me fired,’ I told Ryan.”Kushner “suggested the Post issue an apology and there be a ‘reckoning of some sort’”, Baron writes. No apology followed. Baron kept his job.The Post came with a storied history: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and more. It was no one’s toy or bauble. It was not the New York Observer, once owned by Kushner, whose own memoir reportedly received an assist from Ken Kurson, a former Observer editor pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges only to plead guilty to state charges of spying on his wife.In Collision of Power, Baron also describes a White House dinner in June 2017, months after the inauguration, at which Trump unleashed a torrent of grievance and self-adulation.“He had better relations with foreign leaders than Obama, who was lazy and never called them.” His predecessor had “left disasters around the world for him to solve”.In the same breath, Baron says, Trump took to task the chief executive of Macy’s for pulling Trump-branded products in reaction to his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”. The store, Trump said, “would have been picketed by only 20 Mexicans. Who cares?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBaron also captures Trump throwing jabs at Benjamin Netanyahu, complaining of how little the US received in exchange for aid to Israel. Fresh off a trip there, and advised he couldn’t leverage aid to broker peace with the Palestinians, Trump was annoyed.“I was told ‘there’s no connection,’” Trump told Bezos, Baron, Ryan and Fred Hiatt, another Post editor. “He was incredulous. ‘No connection?’”Trump’s take, Baron says, foreshadowed reporting by Barak Ravid of Axios, that Trump “said he was surprised to find that the Palestinians want a peace deal more than the Israelis”. In his own book, Trump’s Peace, Ravid captures Trump saying of Netanyahu, “fuck him”, and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures.A postscript: Trump’s dinner with Baron and Bezos was held on 15 June 2017, the night of the congressional baseball game. Trump chose to hang out with a bunch of reporters despite the shooting, at practice for that game, of Steve Scalise of Louisiana, a House Republican leader and Trump supporter, who was left fighting for his life.Of course, this is not surprising. In summer 2020, when protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd came close to the White House, Trump hid in the basement. More recently, John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, has confirmed that Trump refused to be seen with wounded veterans. In the Trump White House, bravura was common, compassion and bravery near-non-existent.A year after Trump was ejected from power, Baron retired and went to work on his book. As it comes out, Scalise is both battling cancer and plotting to become House speaker. Trump, 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination again.From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”. In the next election, the tenor of coverage will be vital. Should Trump win, the plight of the press may be uncertain. Either way, Baron says, journalists will need “idealism, determination and courage”.
      Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

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      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

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      Don’t Be Fooled. Ron DeSantis Is a Bush-Cheney Republican.

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      One of the strangest ads of the 2022 election cycle was an homage to “Top Gun,” featuring Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. In it, DeSantis is the “Top Gov,” setting his sights on his political enemies: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your governor speaking. Today’s training evolution: dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”The ad concludes with DeSantis in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, rallying viewers to take on the media’s “false narratives.”The imagery plays on the governor’s résumé. He was never a pilot, of course, but he was in the Navy, where he was a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps of military lawyers from 2004 to 2010. DeSantis served in Iraq and at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and made his military career a centerpiece of his 2018 campaign for governor. “Service is in my DNA,” he wrote at the time. “My desire to serve my country has been my goal and my calling.”In recent weeks, we have learned a little more about what that service actually entailed, details that weren’t more widely known at the time of his 2018 race.As a lawyer at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report by Michael Kranish in The Washington Post, DeSantis endorsed the force-feeding of detainees.“Detainees were strapped into a chair, and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink,” Kranish wrote. “The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.”The reason to highlight these details of DeSantis’s service at Guantánamo is that it helps place the Florida governor in his proper political context. The standard view of DeSantis is that he comes out of Donald Trump’s populist Republican Party, a view the governor has been keen to cultivate as he vies for leadership within the party. And to that end, DeSantis has made himself into the presumptive heir apparent to Trump in look, language and attitude.But what if we centered DeSantis in Guantánamo, Iraq and the war on terrorism rather than the fever house of the MAGA Republican Party, a place that may not be a natural fit for the Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer? What if we treated DeSantis not as a creature of the Trump years but as a product of the Bush ones? How, then, would we understand his position in the Republican Party?For a moment in American politics — before Hurricane Katrina, the grinding occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis that nearly toppled the global economy — George W. Bush represented the clear future of the Republican Party.And what was Bush Republicanism? It promised, despite the circumstances of his election in 2000, to build a new, permanent Republican majority that would relegate the Democratic Party to the margins of national politics. It was ideologically conservative on most questions of political economy but willing to bend in order to win points with key constituencies, as when Bush backed a large prescription drug program under Medicare.Bush’s Republicanism was breathtakingly arrogant — “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” one unnamed aide famously told The New York Times Magazine in 2004 — contemptuous of expertise and hostile to dissent, as when the president condemned the Democratic-controlled Senate of 2002 as “not interested in the security of the American people.”Bush’s Republicanism was also cruel, as exemplified in the 2004 presidential election, when he ran, successfully, against the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Americans, framing them as a threat to the integrity of society itself. “Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society,” he said, endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Bush’s Republicanism — or rather, Bush’s Republican Party — was that it was still an elite-driven institution. He ran a Brooks Brothers administration, whose militarism, jingoism and cruelty were expressed through bureaucratic niceties and faux technical language, like “enhanced interrogation.”To me, DeSantis looks like a Bush Republican as much as or more than he does a Trump one. He shares the majoritarian aspirations of Bush, as well as the open contempt for dissent. DeSantis shares the cruelty, with a national political image built, among other things, on a campaign of stigma against trans and other gender-nonconforming Americans.Despite his pretenses to the contrary, DeSantis is very much the image of a member of the Republican establishment. That’s one reason he has the almost lock-step support of the organs of that particular elite, for whom he represents a return to normalcy after the chaos and defeat of the Trump years.It is not for nothing that in the fight for the 2024 Republican nomination, DeSantis leads Trump among Republicans with a college degree — the white-collar conservative voters who were Bush stalwarts and Trump skeptics.The upshot of all of this — and the reason to make this classification in the first place — is that it is simply wrong to attribute the pathologies of today’s Republican Party to the influence of Trump alone. If DeSantis marks the return of the Bush Republican, then he is a stark reminder that the Republican Party of that era was as destructive and dysfunctional as the one forged by Trump.You could even say that if DeSantis is the much-desired return to “normal” Republicans, then Republican normalcy is not much different from Republican deviancy.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Washington Post condemns Pompeo for ‘vile’ Khashoggi ‘falsehoods’

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      Washington Post condemns Pompeo for ‘vile’ Khashoggi ‘falsehoods’Fred Ryan says former secretary of state ‘outrageously misrepresents’ Post journalist murdered by Saudi Arabian regime The publisher of the Washington Post, Fred Ryan, has blasted the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo for “outrageously misrepresenting” and “spreading vile falsehoods” about Jamal Khashoggi, the Post columnist murdered by the Saudi Arabian regime in 2018.Nikki Haley plotted with Kushner and Ivanka to be Trump vice-president, Pompeo book saysRead more“It is shameful that Pompeo would spread vile falsehoods to dishonor a courageous man’s life and service and his commitment to principles Americans hold dear as a ploy to sell books,” Ryan said.Pompeo’s memoir of his time in Donald Trump’s presidential administration, Never Give an Inch, was published on Tuesday.One of a slew of books from likely contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – if in this case one who barely registers in polling – the book recounts Pompeo’s time as CIA director and secretary of state under Trump.The Guardian obtained and reported a copy last week. In its own review, published on Tuesday, the Post called Pompeo’s book “vicious … a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics”.The reviewer, the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner, added: “Hatred animates this book. It’s got more venom than a quiver of cobras.”The murder of Khashoggi caused outrage around the world and stoked criticism of the Trump White House over its reluctance to criticise the Saudi regime, particularly the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who grew close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.US intelligence believes the prince approved the killing of Khashoggi, whose remains have not been found.On the page, Pompeo deplores Khashoggi’s murder. But he also writes that Khashoggi was not a journalist but “an activist who had supported the losing team” and criticises what he calls “faux outrage” over a killing that “made the media madder than a vegan in a slaughterhouse”.On Monday, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, told NBC News: “Whatever [Pompeo] mentions about my husband, he doesn’t know my husband. He should be silent and shut up the lies about my husband. It is such bad information and the wrong information … This is not acceptable.”Elatr Khashoggi also said she wanted “to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband and collect money from it”.On Tuesday, Ryan said it was “shocking and disappointing to see Mike Pompeo’s book so outrageously misrepresent the life and work of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.“As the CIA – which Pompeo once directed – concluded, Jamal was brutally murdered on the orders of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. His only offense was exposing corruption and oppression among those in power – work that good journalists around the world do every day.”Pompeo responded on Twitter, writing: “Americans are safer because we didn’t label Saudi Arabia a pariah state. I never let the media bully me. Just because someone is a part-time stringer for the Washington Post doesn’t make their life more important than our military serving in dangerous places protecting us all. I never forgot that.”Ryan said Khashoggi, who wrote for the Post while resident in the US, “dedicated himself to the values of free speech and a free press and held himself to the highest professional standards. For this devotion, he paid the ultimate price.”TopicsBooksMike PompeoJamal KhashoggiPolitics booksUS politicsTrump administrationUS foreign policynewsReuse this content More

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      ‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on the criminality of Donald Trump

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      Interview‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on the criminality of Donald TrumpDavid Smith in Washington The great Washington Post reporter has published 20 interviews he conducted with the then president – who is now running againJust when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. Donald Trump is running for president again. That was not a prospect Bob Woodward had to deal with when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, after Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein cracked open the Watergate scandal.“Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and it was. Nixon faded into jowly retirement. But Trump yearns to regain the crown.The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s chilling warning for US democracyRead moreWoodward spoke to the Guardian by phone six hours before the disgraced one-term, twice-impeached president took the stage at Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy personal Xanadu in Florida, to announce what might or might not be the greatest political comeback of all time.Does Woodward, who at 79 has written about nine American presidents, think Trump can win again? Or is Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, hammer of wokeness, now the man to beat?“Who knows? Trump’s got tens of millions of supporters. DeSantis is the flavour of the month. DeSantis may be the one. Maybe not. I remember in 1990, before the ’92 presidential election, with a bunch of friends making a list of the 50 people who might be the next president. [Bill] Clinton was not on the list [though] he would have put himself there. So who knows? You can’t record the future.”But you can revisit the past. Trump pulled off an unlikely victory in 2016 in what many saw as an indictment of the media. While there was some fine reporting that left America in no doubt about what it was getting, there was also wall-to-wall cable news coverage and a constant pressure for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to respond to Trump’s latest unhinged tweet. Are there lessons to learn?Woodward says: “If you look back on 2016, there was a lot of good coverage but it was never enough. He was able to sell himself as a successful, wealthy businessman. What do we know about him now that we didn’t know in 2016? There is a lot of evidence, good reporting, investigations by some committees on the Hill, that actually he was not a successful businessman, he’s not wealthy. What’s the lesson from all that? Dig deeper and then, when you dig deep, dig deeper more and more and more.”His image burnished by the reality TV show The Apprentice, the Trump of 2016 was able to essay the role of political outsider and swamp drainer. Now the novelty has worn off, he faces federal, state and congressional investigations and his four years in the Oval Office are a matter of record.Woodward has contributed a trilogy of books – Fear, Rage and Peril (the last written with Robert Costa) – and now an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, presenting his 20 interviews with the president. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green called it “a passport to the heart of darkness”.Woodward continues: “Now he’s going to run again and we in our business need to focus on what he did as president. That’s the office he’s running for. Yes, it’s a political office, and you see all the stories now about the politics of Trump running, people abandoning him, people sticking with him and so forth – that’s an important story.“But the real scorecard is what he did as president and on foreign affairs, dealing with Kim Jong-un or [Vladimir] Putin or all this stuff that’s on the tapes. He made it personal. He ran it on instinct.”Woodward describes the tapes as a “laboratory” for understanding Trump’s presidency. “My conclusions are very severe. He failed as president, failed to do his constitutional, moral, practical duty, and I think, not all, but most of the reporting should be on his presidency.”Woodward cites the example of Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, estimated to cost $1.9tn over a decade, criticised as a handout to the rich and corporations at the expense of working families.“I fault myself on this. I’ve not seen – maybe I’m not aware – of some really good reporting on the tax cut, how it happened exactly, who benefited. I wrote in one of my Trump books, Fear, that Gary Cohn engineered and drove it. The former president of Goldman Sachs benefited from that and you can surmise but I’d like to see my own paper or the Guardian or anywhere say: this is really who benefited from this.”Nineteen of the Woodward/Trump interviews happened in person or by phone between autumn 2019 and August 2020, amid research for Rage.This period included the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. Woodward suggested to Trump that both had benefited from white privilege. The president was having none of it. He sneered: “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow.”This chapter of Trump’s tenure was also defined by the coronavirus, which emerged in China in late 2019 but which he downplayed, claiming it would vanish over the summer. Now, more than a million Americans have died of Covid-19.In The Trump Tapes, Woodward interviews Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser who warned Trump the virus would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency”, and his deputy, Matthew Pottinger, who likened it to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 650,000.Woodward adds: “I discovered they issued this warning 28 January. I was as shocked as I’ve ever been as a reporter.”By April, Woodward could not resist pushing Trump to meet the moment, telling him experts were saying he needed to mobilise the country, coordinate with intelligence agencies and work with foreign governments. Woodward argued: “If you come out and say, ‘This is a full mobilisation, this is a Manhattan Project, we are going – pardon the expression – balls to the wall’, that’s what people want.”Had he crossed a line? His wife, Elsa Walsh, also a journalist, thought so. He recalls: “I did these interviews on speakerphone so I could record them with Trump’s permission. She was there many times and Trump knew that and then afterwards she said I was yelling at Trump and that I shouldn’t be doing that. I’m just supposed to ask questions. She berated me for this. It’s on the tape.”But he insists: “It wasn’t an advocacy position. Trump had these coronavirus meetings and had virus deniers there and so the whole atmosphere was one of ‘Let’s not listen to the experts’. I knew some of these people and found out what they said and they were very specific and it had a logic to it, namely that overall Trump needed a world war two-style mobilisation to deal with this.“I couldn’t talk to him so I passed it on and made it clear this is not me but this is my reporting from what the experts are saying. As I said to my wife, we’re in a different world. It’s the reporter who’s on the street and sees somebody shot. Go help them as a human being and then you phone in the story. This is of the magnitude that 1.1 million people died in this country because of the virus.”By the summer, the scale of Trump’s failure and the price in death and grief were clear. In the tapes, Woodward asks: “Was there a moment in all of this last two months where you said to yourself, ‘Ah, this is the leadership test of a lifetime?’”Trump replies, with dead finality: “No.”Woodward reflects: “Even then, let alone now, it was the leadership test of a lifetime and just, ‘No’. It’s tragic. Not only did he conceal what he knew and deny it but it’s a crime. It’s a moral crime to know all this and not tell the people. I once asked him the job of the president and he said, ‘To protect the people.’ I’ve never heard about or read anywhere in my own reporting or in history where a president was so negligent.”The last long interview took place on 21 July 2020. Woodward said things were bad. Trump did not understand so Woodward had to point out that 140,000 people had died. The president claimed to have Covid under control. Woodward asked, “What’s the plan?” Trump said there would be one in 104 days. Woodward wondered what he was talking about. Then he realised: the presidential election was 104 days away.Such exchanges are damning and ensure that more than eight hours of conversations, by his own words shall Trump be condemned. Why, then, did he agree to talk? As the comedian Jimmy Kimmel put it: “Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes? With tapes!”Trump campaign announcement deepens Republicans’ civil warRead moreOne answer is ego. Trump can be heard flattering “a great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward”. Woodward suggests: “I had been sceptical of the Steele dossier and the Russian investigation and had said so publicly. [Senator] Lindsey Graham, [Trump’s] supporter from South Carolina, had told him I would not put words in his mouth, which was true, and so he agreed to do these interviews.”On the other side of the coin, this is a rare opportunity to hear the Woodward method. The Washington Post, where he has worked for half a century, observed that The Trump Tapes “offers a surprising window into the legendary investigative reporter’s process – a perennial focus of both mystique and critique”.At times, Woodward indulges Trump’s streams of consciousness, airing of grievances and pathological narcissism. At others he cajoles, challenges or confronts. Woodward says: “He’ll talk and talk and talk but I ask questions, very specific questions. What are you doing about the virus? Tell me about Putin.”He did miss one opening. He asked if, in the event of a close election in November, Trump would refuse to leave the White House. The president declined to comment.“It was the only question he didn’t answer in eight hours – 600 questions – and I should have followed up. I should have said, ‘Wait a minute, why isn’t he answering that?’ I didn’t.”Re-listening to all 20 interviews, and finding it such a different experience from reading the transcripts or listening to snatches on TV or the internet, convinced Woodward to release the recordings – a first in his long career. Raw and unfiltered, this is one instance where Trump does not benefit from a reporter “tidying up” his quotations to make him sound more lucid and less repetitive than he actually is.“To be frank, it’s very surprising and it’s a learning experience at age 79, having done this so many years, that there’s something about hearing the voice that gives it an authenticity and power,” Woodward says. “Especially Trump. He doesn’t ever hem and haw, he doesn’t go hmm. He just is right out of the box.”Fifty years since the Watergate break-in, he sees a parallel with the secret White House recording system that caught Nixon.“The Nixon tapes didn’t just come out as transcripts. They came out so you could hear it and this is a version of that. It’s the same problem of appalling criminal – I can’t use any other word for it – behaviour for a sitting president to look away.“There’s a statement that Henry Kissinger once made: ‘What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design’. I’m not sure destiny exists, but what an extraordinary vehicle.”TopicsBooksBob WoodwardDonald TrumpPolitics booksRepublicansTrump administrationUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Bob Woodward to publish Trump interviews detailing his ‘effort to destroy democracy’

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      Bob Woodward to publish Trump interviews detailing his ‘effort to destroy democracy’The investigative journalist’s new audiobook, The Trump Tapes, digs deep into the threat the former president poses to democracy Explaining his decision to publish tapes of his 20 interviews with Donald Trump, renowned journalist Bob Woodward said he had finally recognized the “unparalleled danger” the former president poses to American democracy.His three books on the Trump presidency, Woodward said, “didn’t go far enough”.The veteran reporter will release an audiobook, The Trump Tapes, on Tuesday. On Sunday, he published excerpts in an essay for the Washington Post, the paper for which he and Carl Bernstein covered the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974.‘A nutso proposition’: Robert Draper on Trump, Republicans and January 6 Read moreWoodward, 79, has chronicled every president since. His three Trump books – Fear, Rage and Peril, the last written with Robert Costa – were instant bestsellers.But by Woodward’s own admission, those books exercised reportorial caution when it came to passing judgment, even as they chronicled four chaotic years culminating in the January 6 Capitol attack.Woodward’s decision to pass judgment now did not meet with universal praise.Oliver Willis, a writer for the American Independent, a progressive outlet, pointed to recent criticism of reporters including Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, for allegedly holding important reporting for Trump books. Willis said Woodward essentially saying “Guys, I’m kind of feeling Trump might be a fascist” was a “perfect example of how ivory tower journalism fails to inform the public”.Pelosi says Trump not ‘man enough to show up’ to testify on January 6Read moreSeth Abramson, the author of three books on Trump, said: “I don’t know how it happened, but the Trump biographers who knew this for certain because of their research in 2016 and 2017 were outsold by Bob Woodward 10-to-1 despite him only coming to this conclusion now. A failure of media, or of publishing? Or both?”In the Post, Woodward elaborated on his change of mind.“There is no turning back for American politics,” he wrote. “Trump was and still is a huge force and indelible presence, with the most powerful political machine in the country. He has the largest group of followers, loyalists and fundraisers, exceeding that of even President [Joe] Biden.“In 2020, I ended Rage with the following sentence: ‘When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.’“Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger. When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the [coronavirus] to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job.”In June 2020, Woodward said, he asked Trump if he had assistance in writing a speech about law and order amid national protests for racial justice.Trump said: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.”Woodward wrote: “The voice, almost whispering and intimate, is so revealing. I believe that is Trump’s view of the presidency. Everything is mine. The presidency is mine. It is still mine. The only view that matters is mine.“The Trump Tapes leaves no doubt that after four years in the presidency, Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key cabinet and White House posts.“The record now shows that Trump has led – and continues to lead – a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy.“Trump reminds how easy it is to break things you do not understand – democracy and the presidency.”Leftwing writers were not uniformly skeptical of Woodward’s motives. At the New Republic, Michael Tomasky said he hoped the tapes might influence voters in the looming midterm elections, in which a Republican party firmly in Trump’s grip is poised to take the House and perhaps the Senate.Tomasky wrote: “I hope against hope that the media frenzy that will attend this release will bring Trump back into focus as an issue in this election. There may be nuclear bombshells buried in the tapes that have been held back from the selective leaks.“One wonders whether Woodward is holding some newsy quotes until Tuesday.”Tomasky added: “Let’s hope so, anyway, because what has been striking in these recent weeks is the extent to which Trump has faded from the electoral conversation.”Republicans aiming to take House and Senate seats, governors’ mansions and important state posts will hope things stay that way.Trump is in legal jeopardy on numerous fronts, from investigations of the Capitol attack and attempts to overturn the 2020 election to a legal fight over his retention of White House records, criminal and civil suits concerning his business activities, and a defamation suit from the writer E Jean Carroll, who says Trump raped her.Maggie Haberman on Trump: ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’Read moreThe former president denies wrongdoing and continues to float a third White House run. On Sunday, Woodward told CBS he regretted not pressing Trump about whether he would leave the White House if he lost in 2020.On the relevant tape, Woodward says: “Everyone says Trump is going to stay in the White House if it’s contested. Have you thought …”Trump interjects: “Well, I’m not – I don’t want to even comment on that, Bob. I don’t want to comment on that at this time. Hey Bob, I got all these people, I’ll talk to you later on tonight!”Woodward said: “It’s the only time he had no comment. And this, of course, was months before his loss. And I kind of slapped myself a little bit: Why didn’t I follow up on that a little bit more?”
      This article was amended on 24 October 2022 to correct a misspelling of Oliver Willis’s surname.
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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the Post

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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the PostThe public editor and media columnist is fascinating and unsparing, particularly about the Times’ Trump-Clinton fiasco Margaret Sullivan has written a beguiling memoir which shares many of the virtues of the work that brought her national attention as public editor of the New York Times and then as a media columnist for the Washington Post. The virtues of her columns, excellent news judgment and old-fashioned common sense, are again on display.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreEspecially in the early part of the book, Sullivan pats herself on the back quite a bit for breaking a glass ceiling by becoming one of the first woman editors of an important regional paper, the Buffalo News. But she is capable of self-criticism, especially for a painful mistake when her paper decided to publish the criminal backgrounds of the victims of a mass shooting. “The Black community was furious” because the paper had deepened “the pain of family and friends who were mourning their loved ones” – and “they were right”. Too often victims of police violence in Buffalo had been described as “no angel”.She quotes Goethe on the benefits of such a mistake: “By seeking and blundering, we learn.”The next phase of her career, when she identified the blunders of editors and reporters at the New York Times, then publicized them in her columns, is the most interesting part of the book.Sullivan quickly learned what I discovered many years ago, when I switched from writing about politicians and prosecutors for the Times to critiquing journalists for Newsweek: reporters have by far the thinnest skins of any public figures. It’s not surprising: a big reason many choose to become journalists is to give themselves a feeling of being in control, so they often feel discombobulated when they are the subject of an interview instead of its progenitor.To her credit, Sullivan offended the sports editor and the politics editor of the Times equally. She showed she had the right instincts with her first blogpost, calling for “rigorous adherence not just to the facts but to the truth, and away from the defensive performative neutrality that some were beginning to call false balance or false equivalence (‘Some say the earth is round; others insist it is flat’ or, more pertinently ‘Some say climate change is real and caused partly by human behavior; others insist it doesn’t exist’.)”She almost never had “a completely comfortable day” as public editor, which means she did a good job: “If the people I worked next to were happy with me, I felt guilty for being too soft on the institution … If they were upset with me – sometimes even furious” she worried she had been too harsh.One of her worthiest crusades was against the vast use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington stories. When Eric Schmitt, a national security reporter, was appointed to a committee on reporting practices, he was astonished to learn that readers’ “number one complaint, far and away, was anonymous sources”. A reader wrote to Sullivan: “I beseech the Times not to facilitate government acting like the Wizard of Oz – behind a curtain.”Although Sullivan was at the paper a decade after its worst modern anonymous sources fiasco – dozens of stories promoting the idea that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were real – she found practically nobody had learned any lessons.The practice was still “vastly overused … not just for ultra-sensitive reporting on the national security beat but also for all kinds of frivolous purposes – in gossipy entertainment pieces, in personality profiles, in real estate stories”. Sullivan inaugurated “AnonyWatch”, asking readers to send examples of anonymous sourcing.Some of the very worst journalism practiced by the Times during Sullivan’s tenure was its coverage of the 2016 election. The paper’s first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, assigned Amy Chozick to report on Hillary Clinton full-time in 2013. Another press critic, Tom Rosenstiel, pointed out it was probably a pretty bad idea to “perpetuate the permanent campaign” three years before the first primary.Chozick’s first big feature for the Sunday magazine was called Planet Hillary, illustrated by an image of Clinton’s face as “a fleshy globe”. Sullivan agreed with the reader who wrote, “The now-viral image is hideously ugly, demeaning, sexist and completely premature.”Times editors up to Abramson, who approved the image, “couldn’t understand the fuss”. To Sullivan it was an early warning that “when it came to covering Hillary Clinton, Times journalists often took things too far”.Things went steeply downhill in 2015 when the Times – and the Washington Post and Fox News – promoted a book by the Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: the Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.How Chozick chose to write about this crude propaganda? “Already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings ‘big news’ that will ‘shock people’ and make voters ‘question’ the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.Things got dramatically worse with the paper’s obsession with Clinton’s emails, and FBI director James Comey’s decision to put them back in the news a few days before the election. By then Dean Baquet was Times editor. He vastly overplayed Comey’s announcement with three big stories, including one by Chozick and Patrick Healey headlined “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything’”.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreSullivan observes that framing must have caused “rejoicing in the GOP camp”. It did.The Columbia Journalism Review reported that in six days, the Times “ran as many cover stories” about Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up the election.Comey shut down his investigation again. But the damage was done.The Times editorial page compensated a little bit for its news coverage by giving Clinton an enthusiastic endorsement. But as Sullivan points out, editorials rarely sway elections while “relentless front-page political coverage can, especially when it’s in the hugely influential New York Times”.“In this case,” she writes, “I believe it did.”
      Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      Trump Files a Defamation Suit Against CNN

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      The former president has a history of threatening, and occasionally filing, lawsuits against media organizations whose coverage he deems unfair.Former President Donald J. Trump sued CNN on Monday, claiming that the network defamed him and demanding $475 million in damages.Over the course of his business and political career, Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to sue media organizations over news coverage that he deems unfair or disrespectful. Although he rarely followed through, his attacks on the media became a staple of his political messaging and have often been cited in fund-raising entreaties in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections.In 2020, his re-election campaign sued The New York Times and The Washington Post over opinion articles that linked Mr. Trump to Russian interference in American elections. His suit against The Times was dismissed; the suit involving The Post is pending.Mr. Trump’s complaint against CNN was filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The lawsuit alleges a “campaign of dissuasion in the form of libel and slander” that, Mr. Trump asserts, has recently escalated “as CNN fears the plaintiff will run for president in 2024.”The 29-page suit cites numerous times when CNN hosts and guests criticized Mr. Trump over his policies and his questioning of the 2020 presidential election result. It also laments that some guests have invoked Adolf Hitler and the history of Nazi Germany in criticizing Mr. Trump’s behavior. Among the on-air guests cited as having defamed Mr. Trump is the singer Linda Ronstadt.A CNN spokesman declined to comment.A footnote in the lawsuit shows that Mr. Trump’s representatives contacted CNN in July to give notice of prospective litigation and request that the network stop referring to Mr. Trump’s comments about the 2020 election as “lies.” According to the suit, CNN declined Mr. Trump’s request and replied, “You have not identified a single false or defamatory statement in your letter.”In 2019, Mr. Trump threatened CNN with a lawsuit over “unethical and unlawful attacks.” CNN called that threat “a desperate P.R. stunt.” A suit never materialized.In Monday’s suit, Mr. Trump’s lawyers justified their demand for $475 million in damages in part by alleging that CNN’s coverage has caused the former president to suffer “embarrassment, pain, humiliation and mental anguish.” More