Bob Woodward Admits He Got ‘Entangled in the Disorder of Trump’s Presidency’ Over His Covid Response, Feels He ‘Didn’t Go Far Enough’

L: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images R: L: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

The Washington Post has published partial audio and transcripts from 20 interviews with former President Donald Trump  that Bob Woodward conducted with him during the final year of his presidency. Throughout what is described as “The Trump Tapes” there are multiple instances where the two men get contentious with each other, especially when discussing Trump’s policy in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Woodward, who largely conducted the interview as part of his most recently published book Rage, wrote an essay describing the new material, which will be published in full as The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump on Oct. 25. The audiobook will include more than 8 hours of tapes from interviews Woodward conducted with Trump.

“I was struck by how Trump pounded in my ears in a way the printed page cannot capture,” Woodward wrote, noting that this was the first time he has personally released “the raw interviews or full transcripts” in his career. He believed that “these interviews offer an unvarnished portrait of Trump” that people needed to see (and hear) because he realized “Trump is an unparalleled danger.”

As evidence that the transcripts alone don’t convey Trump adequately, Woodward pointed to one particular quote from his fourteenth interview with the then-president on May 22, 2020.

“You’re probably going to screw me. Because, you know, that’s the way it goes,” Trump said. “Look, [George W.] Bush sat with you for hours and you screwed him. But the difference was, I ain’t no Bush.”

Further context for the remark isn’t immediately given, but Woodward wrote in the Post, “The mockery in Trump’s voice does not come through as powerfully or as memorably on the printed page.”

Trump made further remarks about being maligned by Woodward or other journalists in the clips.

“We’ve done better than any other country. Just about, done better than any other country, in handling it. And it’s a bigger, more diverse, more difficult country. And we’ve done better than any — other than with the press,” Trump said in defense of his administration’s coronavirus response on July 21, 2020. “Other than with the press, I’ve done a great job. But with the press, I can’t do a good job because it’s fake. It’s fake news. It’s a fake group of people and you know it, and you won’t write it.”

Woodward wrote further about the interviews he conducted with other Trump administration and government officials at Trump’s behest. The dire picture they described of the White House as Covid-19 emerged led Woodward to believe he had an “unprecedented reporting opportunity” to interact with Trump and learn about his actions in response to the pandemic in real time.

Reflecting on it now, Woodward wrote, “On listening to the tapes this year, I realized I had become entangled in the disorder of Trump’s presidency.”

Woodward noted that he ended his 2020 book, Rage, with this sentence: “When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

“Two years later,” Woodward added, “I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger. ”

The author is well-known for his reporting on the Watergate scandal along with Carl Bernstein during the presidency of Richard Nixon, and made direct comparisons between Nixon and Trump — and their responses to crises — while reviewing the clips.

Other clips from Woodward’s interviews were shared over the past week, several aired first on CNN throughout programming on Oct. 18.

Woodward had previously received, and deflected, criticism over his decision to keep most of the information he learned in his interviews private until the release of 2020’s Rage and Peril, co-written with Robert Costa in 2021.