He's gonna sue!

Always he's gonna sue.  

[Bob] Woodward has released raw audio of a score of interviews he did with Trump in 2019 and 2020. Trump has responded by saying on Fox News that he will sue Woodward (calling him "very sleazy"), not because the tapes are inaccurate but because Trump says they belong to him and he needs to be compensated for their sale.

  NPR

Also, bullshit.  They don't belong to him.  They're a work product of the author.  And he was fully aware of the fact that he was being taped and why.  There's no lawsuit here.

Initially conducted in the Oval Office, the series continued for months with Trump often making surprise phone calls to Woodward at home or on his cellphone.

In these hours of Trump's recorded voice, we hear him striving to court Woodward's favor, praising him as "a great historian" and "the great Bob Woodward."

[...]

The interviews were arranged to inform Woodward's second book on the Trump presidency, Rage, which appeared just before Trump lost his bid for re-election. The president had not cooperated with the reporter's earlier Trump book, Fear, a highly critical study that appeared in 2018.

[...]

Trump spends considerable time seeking Woodward's acknowledgement of the "breakthrough" with Kim Jong Un, the youthful and curious dictator of North Korea. Trump can scarcely contain his fascination with the way Kim eliminated his rivals for the dictatorship, including the beheading of an uncle. Trump offers to share Kim's letters (which are classified information) with Woodward but asks him not to say how he got them.

[...]

Trump's rhetoric remains as it has been since his emergence as a candidate in 2015, delivered drenched in a sense of victimhood that endures even now in his messages on "Truth Social." The main difference is that here his frequent profanities are left intact.

[...]

On substance, Trump dwells on an agenda that ranges from his grievances to his notions of his greatest hits.

Who would have expected anything else?

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

In case you need a reminder about Pence

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

UPDATE:

I don't think it degrades all journalism, but it certainly degrades Bob Woodward.

More Woodward book leakage

President Donald Trump bragged that he protected Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the assassination and dismembering of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018.

"I saved his ass," Trump had said amid the US outcry over Khashoggi's killing, according to Bob Woodward's new book. "I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop."

  Business Insider

And he thought that would impress Woodward in a positive way? Dear God.

Trump repeatedly used executive power to block or bypass congressional efforts to cut ties with Riyadh after Khashoggi's murder.

[...]

The president also bypassed Congress to push through an arms sale of roughly $8 billion to the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, and he later vetoed several resolutions blocking the sale.

More recently, Trump has moved to circumvent a decades-old arms-control pact in order to sell weaponized drones to the Saudis and to other countries in the region, sparking backlash from Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

[...]

Woodward wrote that Trump called him on January 22 shortly after attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. During the conversation, Woodward pressed the president about Khashoggi's gruesome murder.

Khashoggi, 59, a longtime Washington Post columnist known for his criticism of the Saudi kingdom, was assassinated and dismembered at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, after going there to get paperwork for his upcoming marriage.

The CIA concluded a little over a month later that Prince Mohammed, also known as MBS, had personally ordered Khashoggi's murder.

"The people at the Post are upset about the Khashoggi killing," Woodward told Trump on January 22, his book says.

[...]

"Yeah, but Iran is killing 36 people a day, so —" Trump began, before Woodward redirected the conversation and continued to press Trump about MBS's role in ordering Khashoggi's killing.

[...]

The president also told Woodward he didn't believe that MBS ordered Khashoggi's murder, though the US and other foreign intelligence services concluded that he did order the attack.

[...]

"He will always say that he didn't do it," Trump said of MBS. "He says that to everybody, and frankly I'm happy that he says that. But he will say that to you, he will say that to Congress, and he will say that to everybody. He's never said he did it."

"Do you believe that he did it?" Woodward asked.

"No, he says that he didn't do it," Trump replied.

"I know, but do you really believe —" Woodward said before Trump cut him off.

"He says very strongly that he didn't do it," Trump said. "Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time."

He added: "And you know, they're in the Middle East. You know, they're big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion.

Nutso.

"They wouldn't last a week if we're not there, and they know it," he said.

Sure.

UPDATE:

Dear god.

Also, I'm sure most women can understand, since it would take them less than a second after meeting Trump to know that it's definitely NOT going to happen.

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.

Bob Woodward has no excuse

He's complicit in the deaths of thousands of Americans.

Journalist Bob Woodward defended his decision to delay reporting that President Trump privately told him the coronavirus pandemic would be particularly deadly.

“He tells me this, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, but is it true?’ Trump says things that don’t check out, right?” Woodward told The Associated Press in reference to Trump telling him the virus was “deadly stuff” in February. Trump made the comments in an interview for Woodward's book “Rage,” which is set to be released next week.

Woodward told the AP he was not convinced Trump was receiving accurate information about the virus until May, when it had spread around the country.

  The Hill

Bob Woodward is an investigative journalist. To hear people tell it, one of the best. Other people knew as early as January. It wasn't a universally well-kept secret. Bob Woodward could easily have checked it out. And I'm sure he did.

“If I had done the story at that time about what he knew in February, that’s not telling us anything we didn’t know,” he said, saying that at that point he prioritized getting the book published before the election in November.

Yes. Over the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.

Bingo

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

[...]

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

  WaPo

Why didn't Woodward tell us then? Oh, yeah. Book. Money.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control.

[...]

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

[...]

[Infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci] at one point tells others that the president “is on a separate channel” and unfocused in meetings, with “rudderless” leadership, according to Woodward. “His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said, according to Woodward. “His sole purpose is to get reelected.”

Fauci is sure to be shitcanned now.

In their final interview, on July 21, Trump vented to Woodward: “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault.”

[...]

Aside from exploring Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” covers race relations, diplomacy with North Korea and a variety of other issues that have arisen during the past two years.

The book also includes brutal assessments of Trump’s conduct from former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and others.

[...]

On June 3, two days after federal agents forcibly removed peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to make way for Trump to stage a photo opportunity outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, Trump called Woodward to boast about his “law and order” stance.

Why is the idiot calling Bob Woodward, ffs?

In another conversation, on June 19, Woodward asked the president about White privilege, noting that they were both White men of the same generation who had privileged upbringings. Woodward suggested that they had a responsibility to better “understand the anger and pain” felt by Black Americans.

“No,” Trump replied, his voice described by Woodward as mocking and incredulous. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

[...]

In another conversation about race, on July 8, Trump complained about his lack of support among Black voters. “I’ve done a tremendous amount for the Black community,” he told Woodward. “And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love.”

[...]

Trump shared with Woodward visceral reactions to several prominent Democrats of color. Upon seeing a shot of Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, calmly and silently watching him deliver his State of the Union address, Trump remarked: “Hate! See the hate! See the hate!” Trump used the same phrase after an expressionless Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) appeared in the frame.

[...]

“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump told Woodward. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Trump added that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un thought Obama was “an asshole.”

[...]

Even as U.S. intelligence chiefs warn that North Korea is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons and that Trump’s approach is ineffective, the president told Woodward that he is determined to stay the course and dismissively says the CIA has “no idea” how to handle North Korea.

“I met. Big fucking deal,” Trump told Woodward, waving off criticism of his three face-to-face meetings with Kim. “It takes me two days. I met. I gave up nothing.”

Foreign affairs experts say Trump gave up much — including by postponing and then scaling back the U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea that had long angered North Korea, as well as by granting Kim the international stature and legitimacy the North Korean regime has long craved.

And here's why Trump is enamored of Kim (who obviously knows just how to play Trump):

Kim welcomed Trump’s overtures with over-the-top prose in letters. Kim wrote that he wanted “another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.” And he said his meetings with Trump were a “precious memory” that underscored how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force.”

In another letter, Kim wrote to Trump, “I feel pleased to have formed good ties with such a powerful and preeminent statesman as Your Excellency.” And in yet another, Kim reflected on “that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day.”

[...]

Trump remarked that he was awestruck meeting Kim for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump also boasted to Woodward that Kim “tells me everything,” including a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.

Trump did not share his letters to Kim — “Those are so top secret,” the president said — but Woodward obtained them independently. He writes that Trump sent Kim a copy of the New York Times featuring a picture of the two men on the front page. “Chairman, great picture of you, big time,” Trump wrote on the paper in marker. (Trump falsely boasted to Woodward: “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”)

[...]

“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

[...]

“I have built a nuclear — a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody — what we have is incredible.”

Woodward writes that anonymous people later confirmed that the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system, but they would not provide details, and that the people were surprised Trump had disclosed it.

They couldn't possibly be surprised. He blabs everything he's told - if he was paying attention and if he can remember it.

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

That time passed a long time ago, bub.

Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

[...]

Coats, a former senator from Indiana, was recruited into the administration by Vice President Pence, and his wife is quoted as recalling a dinner at the White House when she interacted with Pence.

“I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” Marsha Coats said, according to Woodward. “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’ ”

[...]

When Dan Coats considered resigning because of Trump’s handling of Russia, Pence urged him to “look on the positive side of things that he’s done. More attention on that. You can’t go.”

[...]

“Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals,” Trump told White House trade adviser Peter Navarro at one point, according to Woodward.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is quoted by Woodward as saying, “The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots.”

Look in the mirror, you smug dipshit.

Kushner was a frequent target of ire among Trump’s Cabinet members, who saw him as untrustworthy and weak in dealing with heads of states. Tillerson found Kushner’s warm dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “nauseating to watch. It was stomach churning,” according to Woodward.

[...]

Woodward writes that Kushner advised people that one of the most important guiding texts to understand the Trump presidency was “Alice in Wonderland,” a novel about a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole. He singled out the Cheshire cat, whose strategy was endurance and persistence, not direction.

More like Malice in Wonderland.

UPDATE:

Imagine doing it twice in two years.

UPDATE:

Jesus H Christ!  He made the phone calls himself!

UPDATE:

Aaaand, there it is

He found out what's in Woodward's book.

President Trump on Friday preemptively attacked a forthcoming book from journalist Bob Woodward, despite previously praising him as a "very good writer" and agreeing to be interviewed for the Watergate reporter's latest book.

[...]

Trump's attack on The Washington Post author comes days after the first details of his forthcoming book about the president were released.

[...]

"The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been. But, believe it or not, lately I’ve been getting lots of GREAT books!"

  The Hill

Not. Like Bolton and Mary Trump's books?

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

Woodward sequel to "Fear" comes out September 15

Bob Woodward’s second book on the Trump White House [...] promises to reveal the secrets of “25 personal letters exchanged between [Donald] Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that have not been public before”.

In the letters, according to details from Simon & Schuster published on the book’s Amazon page on Wednesday night, “Kim describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a ‘fantasy film’, as the two leaders engage in an extraordinary diplomatic minuet”.

  Guardian

A fantasy film. He's speaking Trump's language.

Simon & Schuster promised “an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of original reporting on the Trump presidency … with stunning new details about early national security decisions and operations and Trump’s moves as he faces a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest”.

[...]

Trump’s engagement with the totalitarian state to the north has produced three meetings with Kim and exchanges of kind words, but no deal on denuclearisation and other concerns.

Woodward did not interview Trump for Fear, which the president called “a piece of fiction” by a “liar” with “phony sources”. But in January this year, the president told Fox News the two men had spoken.

“I was interviewed by a very, very good writer, reporter,” Trump said. “I can say Bob Woodward. He said he’s doing something and this time I said, ‘Maybe I’ll sit down.’”

A liar with phony sources, but a very, very good reporter. He "sat down" to spin a bunch of lies he hoped would get into the second book without any fact-checking. That won't have happened with very, very good reporter Bob Woodward.

According to the publisher, “what is not known is that Trump provided Woodward a window into his mind through a series of exclusive interviews.

“At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president.

[...]

Its title may have derived from a conversation Woodward had with Trump – and Bob Costa of the Washington Post – at Trump’s hotel in Washington on 31 March 2016.

Responding to Woodward’s contention that the Republican party had become home to “a lot of angst and rage and distress”, the then candidate for the party’s presidential nomination said: “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I think it was ... I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.

Intentionally, I guess.

“I also bring great unity out, ultimately. I’ve had many occasions like this, where people have hated me more than any human being they’ve ever met. And after it’s all over, they end up being my friends. And I see that happening here.”

Brilliant. Wait till the book reviews start coming out. Or until he reads this article. (Sorry.  Until someone who reads this article talks about it on CNN and he sees the segment.)

John Dowd, a lawyer who worked for the president during the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference and links between the Trump campaign and Moscow, was one of Woodward’s sources.

“In the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw,” Woodward wrote.

“In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying ‘Fake News’, the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’”

Even John Dowd wants to change his image as a Trumpie now.

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

UPDATE:  And there it is.  He's heard.

New Yorker review of Woodward's "Fear"

There’s nothing comparable in American journalism, except maybe Woodward’s “The Final Days,” co-written with Carl Bernstein, about the downfall of Richard Nixon. Yet even Nixon—drunk late at night and talking to paintings in the White House residence—seems relatively sane and pitiable compared with Donald Trump. You half expect to find Woodward’s Trump ordering the execution of the entire National Security Council, declaring himself a god on Twitter, then anointing his daughter as heir to the throne.

  New Yorker

Two out of three, I dare say, are a given.

At Trump’s core lies a need always to look strong, which, of course, makes him look weak. In several scenes, one adviser or another struggles to find the right, flattering words that will keep the President from starting a nuclear war.

[...]

There’s no end to the Cabinet members and generals whom Trump is eager to insult in front of their colleagues, or to fire by tweet. A coarse and feckless viciousness is the operating procedure of his White House, and the poison spreads to everyone. Only snakes and sycophants survive.

[...]

One of his most detailed, most revealing scenes takes place in the Tank, the secure windowless meeting room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the summer of 2017. Cohn and Defense Secretary James Mattis conspire to bring Trump across the river to the Pentagon in order to impress upon him the importance of the American-led international order of security partnerships and trade treaties. The presentation quickly collapses under Steve Bannon’s sophistic questioning. Trump, who cares only about scoring a profit off allies, keeps repeating, “It’s all bullshit!” He announces his intention to tear up the defense treaty with South Korea—“Pull the fucking thing out! I don’t give a shit”—and soon leaves.

[...]

The book begins with Cohn removing a one-paragraph letter that awaits Trump’s signature on the Oval Office desk and that would end the Korean-American trade agreement. Cohn is counting on the President’s flickering consciousness to make him forget about the letter and the impulse to undermine an important ally. But Trump keeps demanding another draft, for destroying alliances is—along with hatred of the press—his genuine, unquenchable passion in politics. His stamina in pursuit of these demons is impressive. Every day in his White House has the disintegrating feel of final days, but the next day is the same, and the story never ends.

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

Waiting for the presidential Tweet saying how HIS book did better

Not possible.  They published several Trump books.  I'm sure ALL of those sold more copies.

FEAR leak

That's undoutedly going to be the title to a number of posts now that Bob Woodward's book Fear is officially out. Regarding the mock interview John Dowd conducted to see if Trump could testify before Mueller:

According to Woodward’s book “Fear,” Dowd told Trump that he’d be “fitted for an orange jumpsuit” if he testified.

“Trump goes ballistic, makes things up, starts screaming [...] ” Woodward told late night host Stephen Colbert on Monday. “‘You can’t testify. You- you are disabled.’ I mean, imagine the lawyer- your lawyer, telling you you’re disabled. ‘And you can’t testify because you can’t tell the truth. You just make things up!’”

As Woodward writes [at] end the book: “Dowd knew he couldn’t bring himself to say to the President, ‘You’re a fucking liar.’”

Dowd left Trump’s legal team in March.

  TPM

Woodward writes that Dowd saw the "full nightmare" of a potential Mueller interview, and felt Trump acted like an "aggrieved Shakespearean king."

But Trump seemed surprised at Dowd's reaction, Woodward writes. "You think I was struggling?" Trump asked.

[...]

Despite Dowd's efforts, Trump continued to insist he could testify. "I think the President of the United States cannot be seen taking the fifth," Trump said.

Dowd's argument was stark: "There's no way you can get through these. ... Don't testify. It's either that or an orange jump suit."

[...]

Then, in an even more remarkable move, Dowd and Trump's current personal attorney Jay Sekulow went to Mueller's office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn't possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

"He just made something up. That's his nature," Dowd said to Mueller.

[...]

In a statement Tuesday, Dowd denied some of the key anecdotes and quotes attributed to him in the book. He criticized Woodward for fueling an "endless cycle of accusations and misrepresentation."

"I do not intend to address every inaccurate statement attributed to me -- but I do want to make this clear: there was no so-called 'practice session' or 're-enactment' of a mock interview at the Special Counsel's office," Dowd said. "Further, I did not refer to the President as a 'liar' and did not say that he was likely to end up in an 'orange jump suit'. It was a great honor and distinct privilege to serve President Trump."

  CNN

Which is why he quit, eh?

And Trump demeaned former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to his face, when Giuliani was the only campaign surrogate willing to defend then-candidate Trump on television after the "Access Hollywood" tape, a bombshell video where Trump described sexually assaulting women.

"Rudy, you're a baby," Trump told the man who is now his attorney. "I've never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You're like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?"

[...]

His inner circle was worried about "The Big Problem," Woodward writes: Trump's lack of understanding that his crusade to impose tariffs could endanger global security.

But the meeting didn't go as planned.

Trump went off on his generals. "You should be killing guys. You don't need a strategy to kill people," Trump said of Afghanistan.

He questioned the wisdom of keeping US troops in South Korea.

"So Mr. President," Cohn said to Trump, "what would you need in the region to sleep well at night?"

"I wouldn't need a fucking thing," the President said. "And I'd sleep like a baby."

[...]

Woodward reveals that Trump ordered printouts of his tweets and studied them to find out which ones were most popular. "The most effective tweets were often the most shocking," Woodward writes.

Twitter was a source of great consternation for national security leaders, who feared — and warned Trump — "Twitter could get us into a war."

[...]

[Ex-Chief of Staff Reince] Priebus, who was blindsided when Trump announced his firing on Twitter [ed: which is also how he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson], referred to the presidential bedroom as "the devil's workshop" and called the early morning hours and Sunday night — a time of many news-breaking tweets — "the witching hour."

Trump, however, saw himself as a Twitter wordsmith.

"It's a good thing," Trump said when Twitter expanded its character count to 280, "but it's a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters."

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

They're all to blame

Nearly 300 pages into Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, a West Wing aide named Zach Fuentes cautions fellow staffers. With depressingly familiar words, Fuentes informs his colleagues, “He’s not a detail guy. Never put more than one page in front of him. Even if he’ll glance at it, he’s not going to read the whole thing. Make sure you underline or put in bold the main points … you’ll have 30 seconds to talk to him. If you haven’t grabbed his attention, he won’t focus.” Some subjects, such as the military, do engage him, but the overwhelming picture is worrying and dire.

[...]

Fuentes is merely an assistant to John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. [...] [I]t’s probably worth mentioning that Fuentes wasn’t talking about Donald Trump; no, he was talking about John Kelly.

[...]

Perhaps the biggest non-hinge moment in the book occurs in July 2017, six months after Trump has taken office and two years since he emerged as a presidential candidate by offering his thoughts on Mexican rapists. “Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy, and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.” The two men decide to meet to “develop an action plan,” which consists of getting the president in the Tank, “the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” because it might “focus him.” But when they do, and succeed in telling him about the value of allies and diplomacy, Trump ignores them and proceeds to rant and rave on a variety of subjects. The meeting wraps up after accomplishing precisely nothing. (This is the event that caused Rex Tillerson to call Trump a “fucking moron.”)

What remains astonishing about the meeting is not that Trump is an idiot. It’s that Mattis and Cohn seemed to have hopes for their plan, believing they could use the sit-down to really turn a corner. The book is so full of scenes like this because the people around Trump seem to have less feel for the president than a politically astute person who spends 20 minutes a day reading the newspaper.

[...]

Despite all the self-aggrandizing quotes from the so-called moderating influences in the White House, the upshot of Woodward’s own reporting is that if we end up riding out this term free of a foreign policy catastrophe, it is more likely to be the result of Trump’s incuriosity and short attention span than a bold act of bravery by one of the grown-ups.

[...]

Nevertheless, there is a strong argument to be made that someone like Mattis should stay in his job, and the person who wants to see him resign in protest is braver than I am. But the case to keep working in the Trump administration is much weaker if your job isn’t a matter of life and death.

[...]

Nor does it ever seem to occur to Porter—or Gary Cohn, whose supposedly tortured post-Charlottesville dilemma is afforded considerable space—that Trump is a racist; that he will continue putting into effect racist policies; and that focusing, as the people around Trump do, on ensuring that the words of his speeches are inoffensive is really just a way of helping Trump politically so he can carry out his policies with less opposition.

[...]

“As an extreme measure,” Woodward writes with a straight face, the staffers “proposed they set up a committee. They would draft some tweets that they believed Trump would like.” This plan naturally fails, but what exactly were they trying to accomplish, and why?

The story is presented as one in a long line of “here are the adults trying to moderate Trump” tales, but except for a cursory reference to the possibility of a tweet getting us into war with North Korea, it is very clear that the group simply thought Trump’s tweets were hurting him politically. [...] It’s one thing to tell yourself you are saving the world from nuclear annihilation; it’s another to just wish the president was slightly less uncouth.

[...]

I trust Woodward’s ability to decipher whether his sources are being honest more than I do Michael Wolff’s, whose dodgy book on the Trump presidency set a very low bar for works like this, but too much of Woodward’s narrative feels reliant on the firsthand accounts of a group of very untrustworthy people.

[...]

Where does all this leave John Kelly, the ultimate adult in the room who is often portrayed in the media as rubbing his temples in frustration with his toddler-like boss? Kelly enters and leaves meetings, gets angry and calms down, rants and raves, all to diminishing returns. He seems to find the president incurious and stupid and potentially dangerous, but nevertheless shares a slightly tamer version of his authoritarian instincts and disdain for immigrants. [...] Like the other characters in the book, Kelly is insufficiently concerned about Trump’s contempt for democracy; unable to truly understand—regardless of his strong criticisms—how incapable of restraint Trump is; and compromised by his own sympathy for too much of the president’s agenda, which has a way of dulling any resistance to the worst aspects of it.

  Slate

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

He's still advertising the Woodward book

If there's really justice in America, it will be from a prison cell.

Senior officials know they have a problem with Woodward. "The problem is his credibility," a source with direct knowledge told me. "They know they can’t give him the Michael Wolff treatment." Wolff, who authored the bombshell "Fire and Fury" was notoriously averse to basic fact-checking — and could be more easily dismissed. Woodward, by contrast, has hundreds of hours of tapes and made every effort to talk to all the main players.

  Axios

Tom Bossert, now a homeland security analyst for ABC News, approached Trump and asked if the president had a moment to speak.

[...]

"I want to watch the Masters...You and your cyber...are going to get me in a war — with all your cyber shit,” Trump said according to an excerpt of Woodward’s book Fear obtained by Axios.

[...]

Woodward writes that Trump “was given a Reader’s Digest version of the Hezbollah briefing.”

  Newsweek

President Trump is livid at the betrayal and stunning allegations in Bob Woodward’s forthcoming "Fear," but limited in his ability to fight back because most of the interviews were caught on hundreds of hours of tape, officials tell Axios.

The book, out Tuesday from Simon & Schuster, re-creates — verbatim — page after page of private conversations with him. The 420-page portrait is all the more damaging because many of the scenes concern foreign policy and national security.

[...]

Trump to James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, who briefed him at Trump Tower during the transition on the intelligence community's findings that Putin had interfered in the election: "l don't believe in human sources ... These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country ... I don't trust human intelligence and these spies."

[...]

"Trump was editing an upcoming speech with [then-staff secretary Rob] Porter. Scribbling his thoughts in neat, clean penmanship, the president wrote, 'TRADE IS BAD.'"

[...]

Former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn told Trump: "You have a Norman Rockwell view of America."

"Several times Cohn just asked the president, 'Why do you have these views [on trade]?' 'I just do,' Trump replied. 'I've had these views for 30 years.' 'That doesn't mean they're right,' Cohn said. 'I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn't mean I was right.'"

[...]

The book's last paragraph: "[I]n the man and his presidency [former Trump lawyer John] Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying 'Fake News,' the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: 'You're a f@#$ing liar.'"

  Axios

And Cohn has spent 30 hours testifying to Mueller investigators. (In addition to being wrong about his football chances, Cohn, who came from Goldman Sachs, also thinks trickle-down economics is a good thing.)

On the day after Robert Mueller was named special counsel, Bob Woodward writes in "Fear," President Trump "erupted into uncontrollable anger, visibly agitated to a degree that no one in his inner circle had witnessed before."

"He watched a two-hour block of Fox News, and then most of the two-hour long blocks of MSNBC and CNN that he had TiVo'd. ... He raged at the coverage. ... 'Everybody's trying to get me ... It's unfair. Now everybody's saying I'm going to be impeached ... They're going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.'"

  Axios

It's the finances he's particularly worried about.

President Trump is reportedly furious at former White House aides Gary Cohn and Rob Porter after the pair featured in excerpts of Bob Woodward's forthcoming book on the Trump administration.

[...]

Trump denied last Tuesday an section in the book about how Cohn once took a letter from his desk to prevent him from exiting a trade deal with South Korea. Trump condemned the claim as "false" and "made up."

[...]

Porter is mentioned in a separate section in which Trump calls his second speech seeking to clarify his remarks that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the deadly confrontations in August 2017 between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.,

“That was the biggest f---ing mistake I’ve made,” Trump told Porter, according to the book. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?"

  Washington Examiner

Veteran journalist Bob Woodward on Sunday described an incident in which President Trump once drafted a tweet that North Korea would have read as a warning of an imminent U.S. attack.

"[Trump] drafts a tweet saying, 'We are going to pull our dependents from South Korea — family members of the 28,000 people there,' " Woodward said during an interview with CBS.

"At that moment, there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that 'my God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as an attack is imminent,' " Woodward said.

Explosive excerpts from Woodward's upcoming book, "Fear: Trump in the White House," have emerged throughout the week, documenting a chaotic White House in which staffers regularly attempt to act against the wishes of their boss.

  The Hill

We're at a hinge point in the Trump presidency, and staff sound as unsettled as I've heard them in the 19 months since he took office.

[...]

Here's a long list of likely investigations awaiting Trump. [ed: in that Axios article: "The spreadsheet — which I'm told originated in a senior House Republican office — catalogs more than 100 formal requests from House Democrats this Congress, spanning nearly every committee."]

[...]

Trump has grown to resent and distrust his White House Counsel, Don McGahn, who has spent hours cooperating with Robert Mueller's team.

McGahn leaves this fall and he leaves behind an office unprepared to deal with the blizzard of subpoenas, investigations and possible impeachment proceedings that likely await it next year. Almost all of McGahn's deputies have already gone.

[...]

Bob Woodward's book hits the stands on Tuesday. Trump's advisers have spent the past few days reading a PDF of the book, and the president now knows that some of his previously trusted White House aides play starring roles in Woodward's narrative.

[...]

The White House press and communications teams are very thin, after a handful of staff resigned or were forced out. They are wrestling with a firehose of bad news.

  Axios

But it's a smooth running operation, according to His Lardship.

A red letter day in the Trump-Russia connections affair

The Grand Jury will meet to consider indictments of two Roger Stone figures, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, and George Papadopoulos will be sentenced.

In the meantime, more Trump-is-insane leaks:

[Yale University psychiatrist] Dr. Bandy Lee told Salon and The New York Daily News on Thursday that two White House officials flagged Trump's behavior last October.

"[They] said that Trump was 'scaring' them, that he was 'unraveling," Lee, who wrote the book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told Salon.

"Not wishing to confuse the role I chose, as an educator of the public, and a potential treatment role, I referred them to the local emergency room without inquiring much further," Lee added to Salon.

[...]

"I thought I would be more effective by retaining my public role then getting involved in either the treatment of those who were feeling scared or in the actual intervention with the President," she added.

  The Hill

Pretty sure Bob Woodward keeps receipts.  And, Dr. Lee, you're the expert, but I don't think there's anything that can cure a pathological liar.

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

Another article about WH implosion

The West Wing came to a virtual standstill yesterday after The Washington Post published the first excerpts of Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, Fear. The book by the veteran White House chronicler portrays Donald Trump as an unhinged and ill-informed commander in chief surrounded by aides who doubt his intelligence and question his fitness for office. “It’s pandemonium. He literally isn’t talking to anyone. He’s canceled meetings and is on the phone calling up his friends,” one source said. Current and former staffers, meanwhile, pointed fingers in all directions as they sought to deflect blame for the damaging leaks.

[...]

Two sources told me Trump is furious at the portions of the book that describe administration officials questioning his intelligence and emotional stability.

[...]

Trump is also outraged that the book portrays aides as believing they are the grown-ups protecting the country from his dangerous impulses.

  Vanity Fair

And somebody just dropped a bomb in the NYT editorial pages saying that very thing.

Buckle up.

Two sources said Trump is particularly angry with former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is revealed in the book to have snatched a letter off Trump’s desk to protect “national security.” [...] One source said Cohn called up his former colleagues to ask them how he came off in the book. “Gary wanted to make sure he didn’t compromise himself that much,” a source who spoke with Cohn said. (Cohn declined to comment.)

Makes you wonder if Cohn wrote that op-ed.

“It’s bad and it’s going to get worse,” a former West Wing staffer said. An outside adviser added, “Everybody on the inside knows it’s true. It’s just Fox News people who don’t want to admit how crazy he is.” Kelly and Mattis issued strong statements denying the quotes attributed to them, but two former administration officials said the book has rekindled Trump’s desire to fire both officials after the midterms.

[...]

“You can normally only do 10 percent of what he tells you to do. Ninety percent is fucking crazy,” a former West Wing official said, fretting about what Trump may instruct aides to do.

[...]

Even Trump’s family is concerned the president is in deep trouble. After attending John McCain’s funeral, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump told Trump he needs to get control of himself. A person briefed on the conversation recalled, “Jared told him if they’re going to last in Washington they can’t be this far off the mark with the establishment.”

I'd like to hear what Trump said to them.

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

Gutless, the lot of them

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

Trump responds to Woodward's book

So far, he's put up eight tweets since the news broke last evening, including expected denials from John Kelly and General Mattis.  He's tweeted about nothing else for the last 14 hours.  Of course it was the first thing on his little Twitter mind this morning.  Seven of the 8 tweets are from last night - and it's early, so expect more.  The official Sarah Sanders response claims the book to be "nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad."

He does that well enough on his own, Sarah.

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

UPDATE:



Everything reported about him in the book is credible.  All you have to do is follow his tweets and interviews, not to mention his raging rallies.



UPDATE two hours later:  He's moved on to bragging.  I presume someone gave him candy.



UPDATE:



The whole rotten lot of them are gutless.

Woodward's phone conversation with Trump about the book to be published

This is a very interesting phone call.  Apparently Bob Woodward tried to get to talk to Trump for his book but wasn't given a meeting.  He asked several people, including Kellyanne Conway, who didn't even pass the word on to Trump.  Apparently, Lindsey Graham did, but Trump alternately claims no one told him, and that Grahm only mentioned something quickly in passing.   He says it's okay, he'll just have one more bad book about him.  When he learns what people were saying, I have a feeling it won't be okay any longer.

There'll be some tweet raging as soon as Fox & Friends reviews Bob Woodward's new book

Some pathetic and scary highlights from Fear: Trump in the White House at the Washington Post:

John Dowd was convinced that President Trump would commit perjury if he talked to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. So, on Jan. 27, the president’s then-personal attorney staged a practice session to try to make his point.

[...]

In the White House residence, Dowd peppered Trump with questions about the Russia investigation, provoking stumbles, contradictions and lies until the president eventually lost his cool.

[...]

“This thing’s a goddamn hoax,” Trump erupted at the start of a 30-minute rant that finished with him saying, “I don’t really want to testify.”

[...]

Woodward depicts Trump’s anger and paranoia about the Russia inquiry as unrelenting, at times paralyzing the West Wing for entire days. Learning of the appointment of Mueller in May 2017, Trump groused, “Everybody’s trying to get me”— part of a venting period that shellshocked aides compared to Richard Nixon’s final days as president.

[...]

Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

[...]

At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, [...] Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the [Korean] region at all.

“We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

[...]

“Secretaries of defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for,” Mattis told friends at one point, prompting laughter as he explained Trump’s tendency to go off on tangents about subjects such as immigration and the news media.

Inside the White House, Woodward portrays an unsteady executive detached from the conventions of governing and prone to snapping at high-ranking staff members, whom he unsettled and belittled on a daily basis.

[...]

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was “unhinged,” Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

[...]

Woodward writes that [ex-Chief of Staff Reince] Priebus dubbed the presidential bedroom, where Trump obsessively watched cable news and tweeted, “the devil’s workshop,” and said early mornings and Sunday evenings, when the president often set off tweetstorms, were “the witching hour.”

Trump apparently had little regard for Priebus. He once instructed then-staff secretary Rob Porter to ignore Priebus, even though Porter reported to the chief of staff, saying that Priebus was “‘like a little rat. He just scurries around.’”

[...]

He often mocked former national security adviser H.R. McMaster behind his back, puffing up his chest and exaggerating his breathing as he impersonated the retired Army general, and once said McMaster dresses in cheap suits, “like a beer salesman.”

Trump told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a wealthy investor eight years his senior: “I don’t trust you. I don’t want you doing any more negotiations. … You’re past your prime.”

[...]

Trump told Porter that Sessions was a “traitor” for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, Woodward writes. Mocking Sessions’s accent, Trump added, “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

[...]

After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

[...]

Then-White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, [...] a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

[...]

Under orders from the president, Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

[...]

At one point, Porter, who departed in February amid domestic abuse allegations, is quoted as saying, “This was no longer a presidency. This is no longer a White House. This is a man being who he is.”

[...]

Cohn came to regard the president as “a professional liar” and threatened to resign in August 2017 over Trump’s handling of a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Cohn, who is Jewish, was especially shaken when one of his daughters found a swastika on her college dorm room.

[...]

When Cohn met with Trump to deliver his resignation letter after Charlottesville, the president told him, “This is treason,” and persuaded his economic adviser to stay on. Kelly then confided to Cohn that he shared Cohn’s horror at Trump’s handling of the tragedy — and shared Cohn’s fury with Trump.

“I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times,” Kelly told Cohn, according to Woodward. Kelly himself has threatened to quit several times, but has not done so.

  WaPo

I have a feeling it won't be long now.

Such moments of panic are a routine feature, but not the thrust of Woodward’s book, which mostly focuses on substantive decisions and internal disagreements, including tensions with North Korea as well as the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

Woodward recounts repeated episodes of anxiety inside the government over Trump’s handling of the North Korean nuclear threat. One month into his presidency, Trump asked Dunford for a plan for a preemptive military strike on North Korea, which rattled the combat veteran.

Holy shit.

The president’s family members, while sometimes touted as his key advisers by other Trump chroniclers, are minor players in Woodward’s account, popping up occasionally in the West Wing and vexing adversaries.

[...]

Woodward recounts an expletive-laden altercation between Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist.

“You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon screamed at her, telling her that she had to work through Priebus like other aides. “You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!”

Ivanka Trump, who had special access to the president and worked around Priebus, replied: “I’m not a staffer! I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.”

[...]

Priebus is quoted as describing Trump officials not as rivals but as “natural predators.” “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody,” Priebus says.

Hovering over the White House was Mueller’s inquiry, which deeply embarrassed the president. Woodward describes Trump calling his Egyptian counterpart to secure the release of an imprisoned charity worker and President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi saying: “Donald, I’m worried about this investigation. Are you going to be around?”

Trump relayed the conversation to Dowd and said it was “like a kick in the nuts,” according to Woodward.

[...]

On March 5, Dowd and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow met in Mueller’s office with the special counsel and his deputy, James Quarles, where Dowd and Sekulow reenacted Trump’s January practice session.

Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”

“John, I understand,” Mueller replied, according to Woodward.

Later that month, Dowd told Trump: “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

But Trump, concerned about the optics of a president refusing to testify and convinced that he could handle Mueller’s questions, had by then decided otherwise.

“I’ll be a real good witness,” Trump told Dowd, according to Woodward.

“You are not a good witness,” Dowd replied. “Mr. President, I’m afraid I just can’t help you.”

The next morning, Dowd resigned.

If they didn't videotape that practice session and play it back to him, they made a huge mistake.

And you didn't think it could be worse than you imagined.

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

UPDATE:

Phone conversation between Bob Woodward and Trump regarding the book being written.

The Sad Demise of Bob Woodward

He's come undone.

This story should be deader than Kim Jong-Il. Bob said something silly about something Gene Sperling said to him. He got a couple of suckers from Tiger Beat On The Potomac to listen to his accounts of the tiny black helicopters now circling his skull. He released a full rack of e-mails that made him look even sillier. But, hey, he's Bob Fking Woodward, and you're not, and maybe the profession owes him a couple, so the whole matter likely would have faded from his public profile the way that his ludicrous account of a deathbed Iran-Contra confession from William Casey apparently has.

Except that he won't...shut...up. On Thursday night, he went on TV without a HazMat suit to plead his case to Sean Hannity.

[...]

Moreover, Woodward [...] argued that, because he never specifically used the word "threat" to describe Sterling's caution that Woodward would "regret" saying that the Sequestration was the president's idea, that he hasn't been all over the public prints and the public airwaves saying he'd been threatened with retaliation by the White House. (Which brings up the obvious question — what can they possibly do to Bob Fking Woodward?) OK, now even I'm starting to think Nixon was framed.

[...]

His whole problem is that the e-mails do speak for themselves, and they disagree with the interpretation that Woodward has placed on them, and, because he's a meathead, and because he's not a deft enough thinker to extricate himself from this wholly unnecessary comedy, he keeps explaining how Sperling threatened him in a way that was not a threat. An intervention is sorely needed here, or a stun gun.

  Charlie Pierce

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