'Deep down, he's a terrified little boy': Bob

Woodward, John Bolton and others on

Trump
The authors of recent exposés, including Mary Trump and Anthony Scaramucci,
on the president, his time in office and what they expect to happen at the polls

Interviews by Jude Rogers and Andrew Anthony

Sun 25 Oct 2020 07.00 EDT

Bob Woodward: ‘I can’t think of a time I’ve felt more anxiety

about the presidency’
Bob Woodward is associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of
20 books on American politics. In 50 years as a journalist he has covered nine
presidents. His reporting on the Watergate break-in and cover-up with his
colleague Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon and won the Post
a Pulitzer prize. His latest book about Donald Trump, Rage, is based on 10
hours of interviews, spread over 19 taped phone calls, often initiated by the
president himself, in which Trump proved “only too willing to blow the
whistle on himself”, as the Observer’s review noted.

There is an atmosphere in Washington of high anxiety. Trump is melting

down, to put it charitably. His campaign has been about lashing out, about
wanting his former political opponents – President Obama and Joe Biden,
who’s now running against him, of course – to be indicted then charged. Then
there was his announcement that he is not necessarily going to accept the
electoral result against him. The idea that the president would put in doubt
the basic process of democracy and voting is not only unacceptable, it is a
nightmare.

Investigative journalist Bob Woodward. Photograph:

Alex Gallardo/Reuters

Now you have the added factor that Trump’s also had Covid-19 and he’s on
steroids, saying things like, “It is a blessing from God that I got the virus”. I
can’t think of anything more absurd, or crueller, than calling it a blessing from
God. More than 210,000 people have died in the US. For the president of the
US to talk like that is unbelievable, but I think people have become numb to it.
The outrages pile up, in a way. People have forgotten the risks. I think Kamala
Harris put it very well in the vice-presidential debate: what’s happened in the
US with Covid-19 is the biggest failure of the president to exercise his
responsibilities, perhaps in the history of the US.
This is a really dangerous period before the election. I got to know Trump very
well in hours and hours of interviews I did with him for my book, Rage, and I
think if there were to be some accident, some problem, during the final
campaign weeks, he would capitalise on it. Henry Kissinger, of all people, was
warning recently that we should worry about some sort of crisis, and
reminded people that the first world war started because of an accident.
Probably no one’s wanting to start a war right now, but we have a climate in
the Middle East, and in the South China Sea, which China has really
militarised, where you could have some spark trigger a mild confrontation –
not that I think Trump’s going to manufacture that.

Trump is not sufficiently tuned into the attitudes and experiences of other
people, which is an essential requirement of a leader. After George Floyd was
killed, I asked him about the tensions ignited in this country not seen since
the heights of the civil rights movement. I said we were men of white
privilege, that we’ve got to understand the pain and anger black people feel in
this country. That’s when he said something that astonished me: “Wow, you
sure drank the Kool-Aid! I don’t feel that at all.” He just rejected the idea that
somehow white people have to understand the pain and anger of others. I
think that’s one of his chief problems. He thinks in terms of his own pain and
anger, and what he wants to do, which is to be re-elected.

Trump also told me the US has nuclear weapons that are so devastating even
President Putin and President Xi of China don’t know about them. I’m not
exactly sure even today whether he was exaggerating or talking about
something real. But what’s a really important question to consider here is how
much power is in the presidency: when we decide to go to war, whether you
look at Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s all been led by the president,
essentially, as commander in chief. As we’ve gone into a media environment
of impatience and speed because of the internet, the president is also in this
position to seize the airwaves. As his son-in-law Jared Kushner said, the news
is going along and then Trump tweets something and everyone drops
whatever it is. Trump realises this. He uses it. He has that power. He loves
being in control. He loves the spectacle. The circumstances have all converged
here to give him extraordinary power.

Looking to the aftermath of the election, Trump’s set the table to say that if he
doesn’t win, he’s going to be suspicious of mail-in votes. I think the question
is: if he loses, will his political party get together and go see him and talk to
him, and say, you can’t do this? You can’t do it to the Republican party and
most importantly you can’t do it to the country. There has to be an orderly
transference of power, if that’s what it comes to.

This is the level of anxiety I have now as a reporter: I go to sleep and get up in
the middle of the night and start checking the news because God knows what
might have happened. We are sitting on pins and needles in this country
about every moment, every action, every assessment, and it is draining. I
think lots of people have got to the point where they are tuning Trump and
the political situation out as well as they can.

Unfortunately, the impacts on people’s lives carry on, given the virus, given
there’s no plan, or organised way of dealing with this. It’s all seat-of-the-pants
impulsive decision-making. I can’t think of a time – and I’ve been a reporter
for nearly 50 years – where I’ve felt more anxiety about the country and the
presidency and the future. JR

Mary Trump: ‘If he wins, it’s over. Democracy is over’

Mary Trump is a psychologist and the niece of Donald Trump. Her father,
Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, died when she was 16. Her tell-
all book about the president and the Trump family, Too Much and Never
Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, sold
almost 1m copies on the first day it was published in July this year.

Mary Trump, the daughter of the president’s older

brother, Fred Trump Jr. Photograph: Peter
Serling/Simon Schuster/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

My theory about the way Donald has run his campaign is that he knows he’s in
desperate shape, so he’s going to burn it all down, sow more chaos and
division, because that’s where he succeeds. He knows that he’s losing – he’ll
deny it mightily – and at some level he understands what’s at stake. If he
loses, he’s probably going to prison. So, if he’s going down, he’s going to take
us all down with him.

I’ve always believed that deep down Donald is a terrified little boy. The
amount of fear he’s feeling now has got to be unhinging him. Not only did he
get sick with the virus, there’s the tax story and his prospects in the election
looking really bad right now. He’s got to be absolutely panicked.

Throughout the campaign I thought that the absolute worst scenario would be
for him to get the virus and then get well. I know that sounds awful. He’s
ignored the severity of the pandemic all year because the idea of illness as
weakness is so deeply ingrained in my family, that even an association with it
is unacceptable, and that’s why now we’ve got 210,000 Americans dead. But
now his statement – you can beat it, don’t be afraid of it – is going to result in
more people becoming sick, and many of those will die. Even before he said
that, I believed he was engaging in mass murder, but that sealed it for me.
Anybody who’s capable of putting hundreds of millions of people at risk to
avoid looking bad doesn’t care about you.

Since Donald was elected, I’ve been surprised by nothing he’s done or said.
But I have been shocked by the wholesale abdication of responsibility by the
Republican party during this election campaign and throughout the past four
years. I didn’t understand the extent to which they would be willing to enable
him in Congress and in his cabinet. If they had done their job and acted as a
separate branch of government, he would have been contained. By siding with
him 100% of the time, they have ensured we are now faced with several
concurrent disasters that are getting exponentially worse.

No other president in history has been able to push the envelope the way
Donald does. He’s always trying to see what he can get away with and, as I
have seen through the course of his life, he’s always got away with everything.
No one holds him accountable. He constantly gets rewarded for failing. The
Republicans understood what he was capable of and have allowed him to
push through an agenda that is completely at odds with what the majority
wants.

In Donald, I see somebody who is afraid, lonely, desperate, unloved. I hesitate

to paint a compassionate portrait of him because he’s so culpable. However, I
do have compassion for the three-year-old who was without his mother for a
whole year when she was sick. That loss of affection and having no one to
soothe him was deeply harmful. And when she recovered to the extent that
she did, she did nothing to heal the wounds of that separation, and that’s
before we get to my grandfather, who was always an awful person, capable of
such abject cruelty and sadism. So now we have an adult Donald who is sad,
lonely, ignorant but who also has immense power – and that is a terrifying
prospect.

People need to stop worrying about what might happen if he loses but doesn’t
accept the results and laugh in his face. That’s the best way to undermine him.
If he wins, it won’t be legitimate. He’s already using the powers of his office to
shake people’s confidence in mail-in voting at a time when people want to be
voting by mail during the pandemic. He’s telling his followers if Biden wins it
will have been rigged, telling them to show up at the polls to make sure there’s
no fraud, which is voter intimidation. If you’re a black person in America and
a bunch of white guys with automatic weapons are standing outside the
polling station you won’t want to vote, which is exactly what Donald wants to
happen.

If he stays in the Oval Office, I’m going to try to get a British passport because I
don’t think I’ll fare well. He’s an extraordinarily vindictive person surrounded
by people who are willing to help him be vindictive. But that’s personal: in
terms of the country, if he wins, it’s over. Democracy is over. The western
alliance is over. We’ll be entering an incredibly dark period of autocracy on a
global scale. JR

John Bolton: ‘He was envious of leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping

and Erdoğan’
John Bolton was US national security adviser under Donald Trump from 2018
to 2019. Having started his career as a lawyer, he held senior roles in the state
department and justice department during the administrations of Ronald
Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, who appointed him 25th US
ambassador to the United Nations. His book about the Trump presidency,
The Room Where It Happened, was published in June this year.
John Bolton with President Trump in the Oval Office,
28 September 2018. Photograph: Oliver Contreras/The
Washington Post/Getty Images

People complain that Trump has a short attention span, myself included. But
when it comes to his own re-election he has an infinite attention span.
Decisions are made not on the basis of the pros and cons of the policies being
debated but on what the domestic political blowback could be. Every
president takes politics into account but with Trump it’s qualitatively
different. It’s not just a factor. It’s the factor.

Everything is a distinct transaction – maybe that’s how you’re successful in

the real-estate business. If he doesn’t see the immediate bottom line impact,
he wants to move on to something else. For example, with our close allies, he
says things like: “Here we are defending you and you don’t pay for our bases
and you have trade surpluses with us.” Well, we’re not there to defend them.
We’re there because we have a mutual defence alliance. We think it’s in our
interest as much as the allies’ interest to be forwardly deployed. We’re not
there as mercenaries. And we wouldn’t want to be there as mercenaries. But
he doesn’t get that.

I think his election campaign is in deep trouble. Because of what happened in

2016, when everybody thought Hillary was going to win, he can say the polls
are fake news and that he’ll win anyway. And he’ll say that right up to election
night and probably after it. But unless the pollsters have done absolutely
nothing to try to fix their methodology since 2016, you have to say that he’s in
trouble. Each day you get closer to the election, by definition it’s that much
harder to make up the gap. Nothing in life is certain but it looks like he’s
heading for a pretty substantial defeat.
He’s trying to turn his Covid-19 infection to his advantage. I assume that’s
what he thought he was doing with his grand entrance to the White House,
posing on the balcony like Il Duce. I think it had the opposite effect. One thing
I’ve been waiting for is the wave of sympathy that you would expect from the
American people when their leader is taken ill. Maybe it’s out there but there
isn’t any evidence of it at this point.

I had certainly heard all the criticisms of Donald Trump before I took the job
of national security adviser but I felt that the gravity of the presidency, the
weight of the responsibility, would have an effect on him the way it’s had on
every contemporary American president once they took office. It turned out I
wasn’t right.

The transition and opening six months were bungled and a lot of Trumpian
habits and attitudes were formed in that period. Although I had aspirations to
create more orderly policy processes in the national security area, it was too
late to do it. I was in retrospect overly optimistic that I could correct problems
that were inherent in Trump’s approach to the job from the get-go.

It became clear in ways that I previously found impossible to contemplate that

he had no philosophy, no grand strategy, he didn’t think in policy terms.
Every day was a new adventure. And the way I think successful foreign policy
is laid out is by careful analysis and deliberation, careful implementation,
review and persistence. All of these are things that basically don’t exist in the
Trump administration. There was so much that he didn’t know and he has
very little inclination to learn it. It’s hard to have an evolving conversation
when his data base never changes.

I don’t regret taking the job. I went in and lasted for as long as I could and then
I came out and wrote a book so everybody would know exactly what was
going on. There are still people in there now who are trying to get him to do
the right thing. One thing I worry about in a second term is that people like
that will simply not join the administration. Up until now, it was reasonable to
say, I’ve got enough confidence I can make a difference. It’s very hard to make
that argument now after four years.

I don’t think he has the character or fitness to be president. I once said to a

psychologist that Trump doesn’t have character and the psychologist said,
sure he does, he has a character defect. So I’ll leave that to the shrinks. We
never should have nominated him. Nobody ever said that politics ends up
with the best people for government. But there’s something wrong when
someone like this can prevail.

I think he was kind of envious of leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping and Erdoğan.
They are big guys and they do big guy things and he wants to be a big guy too.
I can’t explain why he has this affinity for authoritarian leaders but there’s no
doubt he does.

I don’t believe he was reluctant to employ me because of my moustache, as

some people say. Would he have made a flip remark about it at some point?
Sure, that’s entirely possible. Whatever his flip remarks – and he’s derogatory
about almost everybody, sooner rather than later – he did hire me and I
actually lasted 17 months. If Trump loses and leaves on 20 January, of the four
national security advisers, I will be the longest serving.

It’s not like there was a battle between us over two competing worldviews,
because he doesn’t have a worldview. And that was the hardest thing for me
to understand and appreciate. AA

Anthony Scaramucci: ‘He’s out there doing ridiculous things

and I fear for the world’
Anthony Scaramucci was a little-known New York financier when Donald
Trump made him the White House director of communications in July 2017.
He was fired just 11 days later after a string of public relations gaffes but
remained a vocal Trump loyalist for the next two years. However, the
president’s racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of colour led
Scaramucci to withdraw his support. Since then he has become an outspoken
critic of Trump, who frequently lashes out at Scaramucci on Twitter. His
book, Trump: The Blue-Collar President, was published in 2018.
Anthony Scaramucci photographed in his office in New
York, May 2018. Photograph: Christopher Lane/the
Guardian

In our country we’re so polarised now you have to hate the person you
disagree with. But I don’t hate Donald Trump. If anything I’m somewhat
sympathetic to him because there’s obviously something wrong with him.
There’s a screw loose and you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see that. You
just have to look at the manic behaviour, the absurdity, the lack of maturity.
He’s not a fully developed adult. He’s out there doing ridiculous things and I
fear for the world and I fear for the country. There’s something wrong with
him and the people around him are too afraid of him to intervene on his
behalf.

He talked about “draining the swamp” but the swamp is now like a gold-
plated hot tub. He’s taken the corruption up to a whole new level. I think if he
loses the election, it’s over for him. I don’t see how he can survive this. He’ll
probably get indicted. However, if he does, he probably won’t serve in jail – I
don’t think America likes putting its ex-presidents in jail. So he’ll most likely
get prosecuted with his sentence commuted.

He likes to mud-wrestle his opponents but he can’t do that with Joe Biden
because Biden is an old-school disciplined politician. His positive-negative
differentials are 20% higher than Hillary Clinton’s. But I’m smart enough to
know that the polls are closer than people think.

If Trump wins, there is going to be a further destruction of American society.

He’ll start to dismantle the institutions of our democracy, and the country will
become weaker as a result of it. There’ll be more disorder, more protests, more
racial tension.
The move back to the White House, after hospital, tried to create these optics
that he’s a superman. But you’ve got 210,000 Americans dead, so if you do a
matrix, there’s about 9 million Americans who have had family or friends hurt
by the virus, so that’s not going to play with them. He’s a minority politician,
he’s a minority president. He’s never had the popular vote; he will have won
the electoral college twice, and lost the popular vote twice.

The fact is he’s an idiot. He’s unfit to serve in the office of the president. He
doesn’t have the management capability. He doesn’t have the ability to
empathise. He’s not a leader. He’s an un-American bully. You could say he had
a lot of those attributes as a candidate in 2016 so why did I support him? And I
would say, yes, I chose to overlook that because I was trying to be loyal to my
party and its nominee.

I started out disliking him. Then I thought, OK, I’m in the Republican party,
he’s going to be the Republican candidate and now he’s won the presidency,
so he’s going to be the first Republican president since George W Bush, let me
figure out a way to like him. I worked for him and I have to own that for the
rest of my life.

I’ve acknowledged my mistake, I’ve apologised for it, and I’ve admitted that I
was wrong in my political judgment and assessment of him as an individual
and as a political leader. People say to me, he hasn’t changed at all, and I
accept that. But I’ve changed. I’m way more psychologically minded. I’m
more aware of the pain and trouble he’s causing people.

I’m very happy I got fired. It probably saved my marriage and my business
career. I was loyal to him for two years but the year after my book came out he
told four women who were democratically elected to Congress – three of
whom were born in the US, the other a naturalised citizen – to go back to the
countries they originally came from. They told my Italian-American
grandparents that 100 years ago. When I said that he was being racist, he
started going after my wife on Twitter. I told Mayor Giuliani: “You’re
disavowing your personal integrity and your family’s history by supporting
this man.” You can’t talk like that as the American president in 2020. He’s a
despicable guy.

I don’t think most of his supporters think he’s the best man for the job. They
see him as a culture warrior, though. The conservative news outlets have told
them that we have a full-on culture war going on in the United States, and he
is the last white man standing to protect America from the black and Hispanic
latte-drinking transvestites who are going to take over their government and
culture.

The president’s strategy is let’s see if I can turn out every racist in America,
and he hopes there are enough to beat the non-racists. The secretary of state
Mike Pompeo’s supporting him because Pompeo looks in the mirror and sees a
future president.

We have 63 million people in the US who have voted for Trump for one reason
or another, and what I can do is explain my change of heart. We now have
almost four complete years of data on his ineptitude. It’s nothing personal,
he’s not the right person to be president of the United States. AA

Topics

Donald Trump
The Observer
US elections 2020
US politics
Bob Woodward
Anthony Scaramucci
John Bolton
features