He always thinks he has magical charm

No matter how many times he gets played.

He offered lengthy meetings in the Oval Office and made phone calls at night from the White House — delivering Bob Woodward an unprecedented nine hours of access across 18 interviews.

Aides spent months fretting about President Donald Trump opening up to the famous Watergate journalist, fearing the consequences all the way through Wednesday’s bombshell revelations.

Trump bulldozed through them all, believing he could charm the man who helped take down a president and chronicled half a dozen administrations over the past half-century.

[...]

The revelations in “Rage” have sent the Trump White House scrambling, with aides blaming one another for the predictable fallout from injecting even more chaos into an already challenging reelection race.

  Poltico

Of course there's still the idea that he likes flaunting his ability to say exactly what he wants and not pay a price for it.

As the White House and Trump campaign sought to tell a different story this fall about their handling of coronavirus, the book’s release is renewing attention on the president’s early missteps in a crisis that continues to disrupt hundreds of millions of American lives. The book’s rollout will continue this weekend as Woodward sits for a “60 Minutes” interview ahead of its wide release on Sept. 15.

[...]

In 2018, White House aides shielded Trump from an interview for [Woodward's] book “Fear” because they didn’t want to give the author more ammunition than he already had. The book was withering — portraying the Trump administration suffering a “nervous breakdown” with anecdotes from current and former aides inside and outside the administration.

[...]

[Trump] made clear to aides that he would participate in the next book, convinced that he could charm and cajole a veteran Washington journalist into seeing his point of view.

[...]

Trump also urged his senior staff members to grant Woodward access and time, allowing him to interview several top aides, including senior adviser Jared Kushner, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger and former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, among others. Often Trump would urge aides to call Woodward directly during the reporting process and kept asking West Wing aides when the book would come out.

[...]

On Wednesday, Trump called the book “another political hit job” — despite the recordings of the president’s own words. And he defended the way he downplayed the virus early on by saying that “you cannot show a sense of panic or you're going to have bigger problems that you ever had before. Please.”

And a sarcastic "please" right back.

The access does not seem to have brightened Woodward’s view of the president. The author bluntly concludes his book with the assessment that “Trump is the wrong man for the job."

[...]

When asked why the president would sit down with Woodward for 18 interviews when his first book was so critical, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said it was because Trump was the “the most transparent president in history.”

Oh, he is that, alright.

In response to the book’s revelations, White House aides quickly started [to] blame one another. Newer White House staffers tried to pin the decision to help Woodward on previous offices or particular aides, even though the president himself made the call to work with the author.

So...mission accomplished. He got everybody fighting each other.

As distressing as several White House aides found the excerpts, they spent part of the day just trying to track down a copy of the book. The White House struggled to respond to audio of the president’s interviews, as well as on-the-record quotes from Kushner — evidence that forced them to argue that, at best, some of the remarks deserved more context.

[...]

“Trump loves brands, and Woodward has been the gold standard for 50 years of investigative journalism around the presidency, so it's the same reason why he likes the Gray Lady, he likes The New York Times. It's the paper of record traditionally in his hometown, so even though both excoriate him, he's attracted to them the way a low-IQ small moth would be to a flame,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as White House communications director under Trump. “Trump is always convinced that if he talks to the person, he is going to elucidate and enlighten that person and get them to like him.”

[...]

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham also helped to persuade Trump to participate in the book and told him that President George W. Bush once cooperated with a Woodward book and it turned out far better as a result, one White House aide said. Graham did not return a call for comment.

Especially after being excoriated by Tucker Carlson on air for his role.

Bush’s longtime strategist Karl Rove remembered it differently, however. “Every president does a Bob Woodward book and gives him plenty of interviews and then later comes to regret it, and this is probably one of those instances,” he told Fox News on Wednesday.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.