Audiobook to release Trump & Woodward talks
Newslooks- NEW YORK (AP)
More than eight hours of conversations between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward will be released next week as an audiobook.
Simon & Schuster Audio announced Tuesday that “The Trump Tapes” will be published Oct. 25. Woodward, along with Washington Post colleague Robert Costa, interviewed Trump in 2016, when he was seeking the Republican nomination for president. Woodward then interviewed the then-president 19 times in 2019-2020 for his bestselling book on the Trump administration, “Rage.”
“I’m doing something here that I’ve never done before, presenting the lengthy, raw interviews of my work,” Woodward comments in the introduction. “I wanted to put as much of Trump’s voice, his own words, out there for the historical record so people can hear and make their own assessments.”
Former first lady Melania Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Vice President Mike Pence are among those who stopped by while Woodward and the president were speaking. The audiobook also includes Woodward’s discussions with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and national security adviser Robert O’Brien.
As reported by CNN, during a December 2019 Oval Office interview with then-President Donald Trump, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward asked whether his bellicose rhetoric toward North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had been intended to drive Kim to the negotiating table.
“No. No. It was designed for whatever reason, it was designed. Who knows? Instinctively. Let’s talk instinct, okay?” Trump said. “Because it’s really about you don’t know what’s going to happen. But it was very rough rhetoric. The roughest.”
Trump then instructed his aides to show Woodward his photos with Kim at the DMZ. “This is me and him. That’s the line, right? Then I walked over the line. Pretty cool. You know? Pretty cool. Right?” the president said.
Trump’s take on his relationship with Kim – and his admission that he didn’t have a broader strategy behind the threats he made about having a “much bigger” nuclear button – are part of a new audiobook that Woodward is releasing. Titled, “The Trump Tapes,” the book contains the 20 interviews Woodward conducted with Trump from 2016 through 2020.
The interviews offer unvarnished insights into the former president’s worldview and are the most extensive recordings of Trump speaking about his presidency — including explaining his rationale for meeting Kim, his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Trump’s detailed views of the US nuclear arsenal. The audio also shows how Trump decided to share with Woodward the letters Kim wrote to him – the letters that helped spark the DOJ investigation into classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago.
“And don’t say I gave them to you, okay?” Trump told Woodward.
Woodward said in the book’s introduction that he is releasing the recordings in part because “hearing Trump speak is a completely different experience to reading the transcripts or listening to snatches of interviews on television or the internet.”
He describes Trump as “raw, profane, divisive and deceptive. His language is often retaliatory.”
“Yet, you will also hear him engaging and entertaining, laughing, ever the host. He is trying to win me over, sell his presidency to me. The full-time salesman,” Woodward said. “I wanted to put as much of Trump’s voice, his own words, out there for the historical record and so people could hear and judge and make their own assessments.”
Most of the interviews were conducted for Woodward’s second Trump book, “Rage,” which revealed that Trump told Woodward on February 7, 2020, that Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” but still downplayed it publicly.
While the blockbuster revelations were published in Woodward’s book, the audio clips of the interviews are a stark reminder of how Trump acted as president and provide a candid look into Trump’s thinking and motivations as he gears up for another potential run for the White House in 2024.
