FOURTH
ESTATE
Opinion | The Awesome Futility of Interviewing
Donald Trump
Even Bob Woodward can’t get a straight answer out of
Trump.
Opinion by
JACK SHAFER
10/25/2022
04:30 AM EDT
Jack Shafer
is Politico’s senior media writer.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/25/awesome-futility-of-interviewing-trump-00063228
If you
agree to an interview with Bob Woodward — as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush,
Barack Obama and nearly every Washington notable has — you enter the session
knowing he will command the court like a champion pickleball player.
He will be
prepared. He will be patient. He will let you have your say: “Show up and shut
up,” he calls the technique. He’ll also extend the match long enough to provide
the illusion that you might be winning it, only to lull you into candor. You
can always avoid him if you think the interview will damage you, but even so,
there will be a good chance that he’ll cold call you on your doorstop at 8:17
in the evening. And you should know that he will interview you and interview
you and re-interview you until he’s collected all 11 points it takes to beat
you.
The most
recent object of the Woodward method is former President Donald Trump, who
participated in 20 interviews with the reporter in 2020. Those chats,
supplemented with analysis and context by Woodward, will be published as an
audio book this week, and have been excerpted in the Monday edition of the
Washington Post. What the Woodward sessions with Trump prove — as if it needed
proving — is that interviewing Trump is and has always been a futile gesture.
It’s not that no news comes out of a Trump interview. He can always be relied
on to say something that will set the chyrons at all three cable news networks
pulsing. But in most cases, this one included, the interview is a hot diaper
mess that mainly illustrates Trump’s narcissism and willful ignorance. He
doesn’t really know anything, which is forgivable. But he also doesn’t want to
know anything, which isn’t.
Woodward’s
frustration becomes palpable in the excerpt. “He is staggeringly incautious and
repetitive,” Woodward writes, “as if saying something often and loud enough
will make it true.” Trump made himself amply available, Woodward writes, so
much so that the interviewer kept tape recorders in multiple locations inside
his house because he could expect the president to call at any time. Trump
vowed to answer questions on any topic, Woodward notes. But giving Woodward a
first-class ticket on the access journalism express doesn’t really reveal much
new about Trump because we’ve heard so much of it before.
He avoids
giving straight answers to straight questions: Woodward asks if the president
of the United States should be asking foreign leaders to investigate his
political opponents. Trump: “No. No. No. I want them to investigate
corruption,” a complete nonresponse to Woodward’s attempt to get him to justify
his impeachment-inducing phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
He appears
detached from his government’s Covid response: Woodward interviews officials
who tell him Trump is not listening to his top medical advisers such as Anthony
Fauci and Robert Redfield. Although he provides no Trump quotation that
supports this assessment, Woodward writes, “It was clear that Trump never
communicated the magnitude of the [Covid] threat to the American people. It
amounted to a large-scale deception and coverup.”
He ignores
questions and freestyles some brazen lies: When Woodward asks what his Covid
plan is in late July 2020, Trump claims that the virus is “flaring up all over
the world” but “we have it under control,” which wasn’t the case. Woodward
presses Trump for details on the Covid plan only to be told, “Bob, you’ll see
the plan over the next four weeks.” Writes Woodward of Trump’s ineptitude, “I
wondered how you execute a plan that doesn’t exist.”
He turns
questions into platforms for bragging and personalization: “I think we’re doing
a very good job,” Trump says of his Covid response. “We’ve done better than any
— other than with the press. Other than with the press, I’ve done a great job.”
On his relationship with Kim Jong Un, “I get a sense he likes me. I think he
likes me.”
He feels,
as ever, put upon: “I have opposition like nobody has. … I was unlucky with the
virus. …”
He wallows
in non sequiturs: Woodward asks if buddying up to Kim Jong Un was strategically
designed and Trump answers, “No. No. It was designed for whatever reason, it
was designed. Who knows? Instinctively. Let’s talk instinct.”
The
crowning lesson of the Trump era, one that Woodward appears to have gleaned
from his reporting, is that only one subject fully engages Trump’s interest,
and that is Trump. Having Woodward approach him to serve as his Boswell
apparently caused Trump’s ego to go def con 3. Elsewhere on the tapes, Trump
refers to Woodward as “a great historian” and “the great Bob Woodward.” Trump
appears to have understood from the beginning that the service of his ego might
backfire, yet he would still take the risk. In the 14th interview session,
Trump says to Woodward, “You’re probably going to screw me. Because, you know,
that’s the way it goes. Look, [George W.] Bush sat with you for hours and you
screwed him. But the difference was, I ain’t no Bush.”
Trump’s
reaction to the audiobook news has been to threaten Woodward with a lawsuit,
his go-to move whenever the news cycle displeases him. “We’ve already hired the
lawyers,” Trump told a radio show host last week. The grounds for Trump’s suit
reflect his feeling that the tapes are “his,” because they were granted for
print journalism purposes (Woodward’s Trump book, Rage), not audio ones. The
legal logic here parallels his belief that the government documents he
allegedly pilfered and stored in Mar-a-Lago are his because he says they are.
Trump
interviews have been and will always be futile exercises in attempting to nail
a blob of mercury because that’s the way he flows. He’s a double-talk artist
who uses words as protective coloration because, as a flighty and fidgety guy,
he resists the compunction to be consistent. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
stop trying to get him on the record. It also doesn’t mean we should let him
say whatever he wants without challenging him. But if Doorstop Bob Woodward
can’t wring a coherent interrogation out of somebody after 20 interviews of 600
questions, nobody can. Interview him all you want, just don’t expect anything
but puzzlement and frustration in return.
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