Bob Woodward Reveals Defense Officials Hyperventilated Over Trump’s ‘Chemistry’ With Kim Jong Un: ‘Gonna Get Us In a War’
Bob Woodward recalled how Defense Department officials and U.S. Intelligence were in a recurring state of panic over former President Donald Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong Un.
Woodward joined MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday night to go over the most shocking revelations from The Trump Tapes, the audiobook containing hours of Woodward’s recorded conversations with the ex-president. The interview began with Woodward describing the “love letters” Trump received from Kim during nuclear negotiations with the North Korean tyrant.
“They really are kind of the fondnesses that teenagers might exchange. There’s nothing substantive in them,” Woodward said. He then mocked the notion of the letters being top secret, saying, “If you read through them, you’d kind of laugh.”
Kim is wooing Trump in a very unsophisticated way and says, ‘Well, if we meet again, it will be out of a fantasy film.’ Which, I guess, is the way Kim thought of it and maybe, to a certain extent, Trump did.
Beyond calling Trump “very careless” with classified information, Woodward explained that the audiobook’s purpose was to illustrate how the ex-president failed to comprehend the gravity of his office. Returning to the subject of North Korea, Woodward remarked on how Trump’s method of dealing with Kim was driven entirely by “instinct,” which deeply concerned officials in his government.
“This is one of the most delicate foreign diplomatic relationships that he is just decided, ‘Oh, I am going to do it on instinct. I’m going to meet with him. We are going to exchange these letters,'” said Woodward. “When you look at it, it is almost more comic than serious diplomacy. But it traumatized his national security team because Kim Jong Un — a thug, murderous, I mean, one of the most awful dictators on the globe — had these nuclear weapons.”
After rolling a tape of Trump flippantly dismissing the fact that the Kim family has ruled North Korea as oppressive dictators, Woodward called that the “ugly dimension” of Trump constantly bragging about his positive relationship with Kim.
‘There was a chemistry.’ He even says. At one point, it is like you know in one second when you meet a woman whether it is going to happen. And again, the Defense Department, the intelligence people were just, ‘Oh my god, he is gonna get us in a war. He is going to do something that will set Kim Jong Un off, and end this relationship like in all of Trump’s relationship. They go up — oh great chemistry — and then all of a sudden, the chemistry evaporates.
Watch above via MSNBC.
