Bob Woodward Tells Jeff Zucker That Historians Will Ask ‘What the F Happened to America’ Under Trump

Photo credit: Alex Wong, Getty Images.

Bob Woodward continued his nearly ubiquitous media tour in promoting his new Trump administration tell-all Rage. That tour even included a headline appearance at an invite-only forum with CNN president Jeff Zucker as part of the annual CITIZEN by CNN day of private interviews and panel discussions. In this episode of Woodwardpalooza, the award-winning author and journalist put in stark relief how he felt future historians would consider this current time in which we find ourselves.

It has been only 13 days since we first heard on-the-record audio between Woodward and President Donald Trump, audio that revealed the president privately expressed the lethal danger presented by Covid-19 while at the same time, publicly downplaying it. But you are forgiven if it seems like the author’s promotional tour has been going on for much, much longer. Woodward has appeared on every network to discuss bombshell revelations about Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, and an apparent disconnect between White House and public opinions on how well it’s handling.

As the conversation wrapped, Zucker asked one final question. “Given everything that we’ve talked about today, given everything you’ve reported, given your years of reporting, how worried should Americans be about our democracy?”

“Well, we should be worried,” Woodward immediately replied. “I mean in the sense that democracy is held, they’re not going around locking up reporters like they’re breaking into our homes, but it’s the leadership failure.” He then clarified, “Trump is going to be president for whatever happens in the election in November — if he loses, it doesn’t change until January,” adding “the coronavirus pandemic — and that’s what it is, is on a moving train. It’s’s going to get worse according to the experts; it’s going to converge with the regular flu.”

Woodward called Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic “a monumental failure,” before rhetorically asking, “what kind of world are we going to hand to people?” Woodward then declared, “The historians, I know, are going to be writing about this for decades, and they’re going to say, what the F happened to America in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020?”

Zucker finished by noting “one of the documents that those historians are going to rely upon as they try to figure out what the F happened will be Rage.

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