Name: “Even Graver Than in Watergate”: Will the Woodward Bombshells and Damning Book Blitz Blow Up Trump’s 2020 Chances?
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“Even Graver Than in Watergate”: Will the Woodward Bombshells and Damning Book Blitz Blow Up Trump’s 2020 Chances?

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Even in a news landscape where it feels like nothing is shocking anymore, the first excerpts from the new Bob Woodward book still landed like a pair of hydrogen bombs. It wasn’t so much the revelation that President Donald Trump had privately acknowledged the danger and severity of the novel coronavirus, even as he was significantly downplaying and minimizing the threat in remarks to the American public. Of course he’d said something like that. We hear all the time about hard-to-believe things Trump said, either from people describing the president’s conversations anonymously to reporters, or in bridge-burning public testimonials from people formerly in his orbit.What made these comments so much more eyeball-popping was that Trump had said them to Woodward on the record. And not only did he say them on the record, but he said them during interviews that Trump knew were going to be used in Rage, Woodward’s latest real-life political thriller, due to hit shelves on Tuesday via Simon &amp; Schuster. And not only had Trump said these things on the record for Woodward’s book, but he said them to an author who had already written one incredibly negative Trump book without cooperation, and was now recording their 18 conversations in total with the president’s blessing.Bottom line: Woodward had receipts, and these receipts were given to the Washington Post (where Woodward holds the title of associate editor) and CNN (where his Deep Throat collaborator, Carl Bernstein, regularly appears on air) to kick off the Rage publicity rollout. Both outlets released the audio within minutes of one another on Wednesday afternoon. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump said of the coronavirus threat on one of the recordings. “I still like playing it down.”In the months leading up to an unprecedented national election, Woodward is just the latest in a recent cascade of authors—both journalists and former Trump insiders, from John Bolton and Mary Trump to Michael Schmidt, Brian Stelter, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Peter Strzok, and Michael Cohen—to publish a book filled with incredibly unflattering and objectively damaging dirt about the president and his White House. (Four of those books are among the top 10 on the latest New York Times ; Woodward and Cohen lead .) Some of Trump’s most prolific chroniclers think the dirt that has spilled out of Woodward’s tome is arguably the most damaging yet.“As a stand-alone revelation, it’s a huge deal,” one White House correspondent told me. “Whether it sinks into the public consciousness is a different question, but at a minimum, he’s gonna have to spend days responding to this. It just becomes another thing for [Joe] Biden to point to at a debate. That’s where its significance is.” Another said, “The most damaging part of this, in my opinion, is that it’s on tape.&nbsp;The Democrats can play the audio over and over and over again.”In no time at all after the news broke, Biden was out on the trail excoriating his opponent. “It was a life-and-death betrayal of the American people,” he blared at a campaign event in Michigan. “It’s beyond despicable. It’s a dereliction of duty. It’s a disgrace.” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was desperately trying to spin Trump’s comments to a press corps that knew better. “The bottom line here,” NBC’s Geoff Bennett, “is that the president, by his own admission, in private, on the record, acknowledged the depth of this crisis, and yet told the American people something very different. How is that not an abject betrayal of the public trust?” And cable news was ablaze with scorching commentary. “It is the smoking gun of his negligence,” Bernstein on CNN, subsequently likening the current situation to the presidential scandal that first put him and Woodward on the map. “It’s a dereliction of duty, recorded as no other presidential dereliction of duty has been, even more so than the Nixon tapes...The facts here are even graver than in Watergate.”Woodward faced his own barrage of Twitter outrage for holding back Trump’s comments for the book as opposed to disclosing them in real time at the onset of a national public health emergency. He his publishing timeline to multiple reporters who reached out to him for a . Asked by the Post’s Erik Wemple if publishing the Trump comments earlier could’ve saved lives, Woodward : “No! How?” Woodward’s first big sit-down interview about Rage is with 60 Minutes on Sunday, followed by a live Today show appearance Monday.At the same time there was another burning question lingering over not just Woodward’s reporting, but all of the recent publications related to Trump’s decidedly unpresidential behavior. The opening sentence of Jennifer Szalai’s review of Rage in the New York Times nicely: “What would it take at this point, amid the crush of books about the Trump White House—after the Mueller report and an impeachment trial and now the coronavirus pandemic—for a revelation about the president to be truly surprising?”I called up presidential historian and author Jon Meacham for some thoughts. “It’s unsurprising that the most chaotic presidency in our history has produced this stream of memoirs and journalistic accounts,” he said. “I don’t think anybody’s stunned that a president who behaves in such erratic ways ends up being the subject of accounts that chronicle his erratic behavior.”What does that mean come November 3? Does it matter that the president’s niece painted a devastating portrait of his troubled psychology, or that Trump’s former national security adviser presented detailed evidence to depict Trump as corrupt, ignorant, reckless, and more interested in his own political gains than the well-being of the American people? Does it matter that a number of high-level government insiders told The Atlantic and other news outlets about Trump and military veterans, or that Trump’s former longtime fixer went on national television on Tuesday night and , “He wants to be an autocrat. He wants to be the president of this country for life”?“In a structurally partisan time,” said Meacham, “it’s hard to know who’s reading and whether the reading leads to any difference at the ballot box. In an election that will doubtless be close because of the electoral college, will the cumulative effect of this portrait of a chaotic presidency lead a sufficient number of voters in the right states to say, we’ve had enough?”Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist who is now part of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project along with several fellow former party big shots, had an optimistic take on that question. “The one thing every campaign has the exact same amount of is time,” he said. “Any hour that the Trump campaign spends defending itself is an hour in a day that they’ve lost. When you’re behind like Trump is, that’s problematic. I think Trump is worse off, it’s just a matter of how much worse. The reason this is happening is because Donald Trump is a lunatic who shouldn’t be president. Everyone who gets close to Donald Trump is horrified by what they see.&nbsp;Trump needs new voters to win. Is this helping him attract new voters? I’d say no.”Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a friend and supporter of the president’s, agreed that the recent publishing tsunami is problematic for his candidate. “Books are powerful election influencers,” he told me. “It’s not the book itself. Even a best seller can have a relatively small number of voters read one. It is all about the author, the P.R., and the buzz. The overall effect of the books has been a negative for the president’s reelection.”Even so, Ruddy is confident that Trump can win in November. “Trump faced a similar media storm in 2016 and still prevailed,” he said. “So I expect he will pull through again.”More Great Stories From Vanity Fair— Melania Trump Sounds in Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s New Book— How Trump’s Handling of White Supremacists Could Create — Ashley Etienne May Be Against Trump— What’s the Reality Behind ?— , According to Josie Duffy Rice— The Pandemic Is Creating in the Hamptons— From the Archive: The Perks and Perils of Being Looking for more? for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story. is Vanity Fair’s senior media correspondent.The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

Even in a news landscape where it feels like nothing is shocking anymore, the first excerpts from the new Bob Woodward book still landed like a pair of hydrogen bombs. It wasn’t so much the revelation that President Donald Trump had privately acknowledged the danger and severity of the novel coronavirus, even as he was significantly downplaying and minimizing the threat in remarks to the American public. Of course he’d said something like that. We hear all the time about hard-to-believe things Trump said, either from people describing the president’s conversations anonymously to reporters,...

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Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

“Even Graver Than in Watergate”: Will the Woodward Bombshells and Damning Book Blitz Blow Up Trump’s 2020 Chances?

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