Learning Anything More About Trump Now, Can Only Be For Entertainment Value (Or Accountability)

Is there anyone who still needs more information about Trump in order to make up their mind about voting in November? His character? His record? Although those two things, for this incredibly self-serving individual, are incredibly interwoven. It’s almost unfathomable that someone might need more information about him. Can you agree that over the past decade, his character and record have been exhaustively scrutinized, discussed and dissected by virtually every media outlet, political observer and even everyone you know. His policy decisions, personal decisions and leadership style are an extension of his myriad personal flaws: a man who openly glorifies greed, wields cruelty as a weapon to edify and satisfy his ignorant, bloodthirsty followers and has turned lies and deception into a political strategy. To expect that his second term would somehow be different from the chaos, corruption and cruelty of the first is wishful thinking at best and, more likely, willful ignorance.

For anyone still on the fence, it’s worth asking: what more do you need to know? Trump’s presidency was an all-consuming spectacle of division and self-aggrandizement. His constant attacks on democratic norms, relentless assaults on truth, and the endless ethical violations weren’t side effects of his governance— they were the main event and the whole point. Whether it was his mishandling of the COVID pandemic, plotting a coupl and inciting a violent insurrection to stay in power or openly courting authoritarian allies while denigrating democratic ones, every major failure and abuse traces back to his character. To separate the two is to miss the point: Trump doesn’t represent a policy platform or a party; he is the embodiment of a corrupt, cynical vision for American politics that will only intensify if given another chance.

Not through lack of trying, Trump failed to stop The Apprentice from being shown in the U.S. The theater debut of the ugliness between him and mentor Roy Cohn is Friday. David Marcus reviewed The Apprentice  for The Forward. He had a unique perspective. Roy Cohn, the film’s villain, was his cousin. “We see,” he wrote “Roy molding Trump out of a lump of formless clay. We watch Trump wallow in Roy’s world of chicanery and bribery, bold-type gossip pages and bald-faced lies. I’ve long thought of Trump as Roy’s acolyte, his disciple… It’s easy to loathe everything Roy represented: The self-hating homophobia. The peculiar antisemitic behavior of a Jewish person a couple of generations removed from the shtetl. The flag-waving, faux family-values conservatism, drenched in hypocrisy.”

In  not-entirely-Trump news however, Simon & Schuster has started leaking the new Bob Woodward book, War, due out October 15, to select media outlets. A team of CNN reporters wrote that the book “gives an unvarnished, in-the-room account of key moments as Biden and his national security team navigate international crises, from the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal to confronting Putin before he invaded Ukraine to private battles with Netanyahu. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants, War is filled with newly reported details of high-stakes showdowns… Among the new details in War:

• Woodward writes that Biden’s national security team at one point believed there was a real threat, a 50% chance, that Putin would use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

• Biden said he “should never have picked” Attorney General Merrick Garland during a conversation over his son’s legal troubles.

• Biden criticized former President Barack Obama’s handling of Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, concluding that “Barack never took Putin seriously.”

• Citing a Trump aide, Woodward reports that there have been ‘maybe as many as seven’ calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left the White House in 2021.

America First— Except Russia

The CNN reporters also wrote that “The book also contains new details about Trump’s relationship with the Russian president. In 2020, Woodward writes, Trump had ‘secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.’ During the height of the pandemic, Russia and the United States did exchange medical equipment such as ventilators. But Putin— who infamously isolated himself over fears of Covid— told Trump on a phone call to keep the delivery of the Abbott machines quiet, Woodward reports. ‘Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,’ Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward. ‘I don’t care,’ Trump replied. ‘Fine.’”

Woodward writes that Trump has stayed in touch with Putin after leaving office.

In one scene, Woodward recounts a moment at Mar-a-Lago where Trump tells a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

“According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021,” Woodward writes.

… Woodward also writes about Trump’s decision to run for president again, including a series of conversations with his ally and golfing buddy, Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea,” Graham said. “Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”

The South Carolina Republican is quoted as saying Biden “won fair and square” but that Trump “doesn’t like to hear that.” Woodward goes on to describe Graham’s attempts to give Trump campaign advice for 2024.

“You’ve got a problem with moderate women,” Graham told Trump after the midterms. “The people that think that the earth is flat and we didn’t go to the moon, you’ve got them. Let that go.”

Graham repeatedly urged Trump to move on from the 2020 election, telling him if he is reelected, “then January 6 won’t be your obituary.”

“I gave a speech today and I only mentioned the 2020 election twice!” Trump said to Graham a few days later, “as if it had shown maximum restraint,” Woodward writes.

As Trump framed his presidential campaign around fear, Woodward writes that Graham said of the former president: “Trump is becoming more erratic. These court cases. I think they would rattle anybody.”

Peter Baker from the NY Times also wrote about his advance copy, noting that “The disclosures raise new questions about Trump’s relationship with Putin just weeks before an election that will determine whether the former president will reclaim the White House… Trump’s campaign dismissed Woodward’s book by assailing the author with typically personal insults— ‘a total sleazebag’ who is ‘slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality’— without addressing any of the specifics reported in it. ‘None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ Steven Cheung, the campaign communications director, said in the statement. Cheung said Trump did not give Woodward access for the book and noted that the former president was suing the author over a previous book. The Kremlin likewise denied the reporting in Woodward’s book about conversations between Trump and Putin and the provision of Covid tests. ‘This is not true,’ Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman, said in a text message. ‘It’s a typical bogus story in the context of the pre-election political campaign.’ While generally disputing Woodward’s account, the Trump campaign statement did not explicitly say whether the former president had spoken with Putin since leaving office and the campaign did not immediately respond to a question about that. But Trump’s oft-expressed affinity for the master of the Kremlin has long baffled even his own appointees, prompted investigations and troubled Republican national security specialists.”