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 defended his publishing timeline to multiple reporters who reached out to him for a response to the criticism. Asked by the Post’s Erik Wemple if publishing the Trump comments earlier could’ve saved lives, Woodward shot back: “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 summed it up 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 disparaging dead soldiers and military veterans, or that Trump’s former longtime fixer went on national television on Tuesday night and warned the electorate, “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. 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.”
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