Phone Call
January 20, 2020
COMMENTARY: Out of the blue Trump called me at home about 1:30 p.m. on Monday, January 20th. It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day—a federal holiday. It was a long weekend and I had just walked in the front door with my wife, Elsa.
Elsa is also a book author, former Washington Post reporter, and staff writer for The New Yorker. She has worked on and edited all of my Trump books. It was the only occasion I did not have my tape recorder ready.
My account of this call is based on my handwritten notes. “Do you have time for President Trump?” the White House switchboard operator asked. Yes, I said. Trump came on the line. Elsa later checked the phone’s call log and verified the call came in at 1:23 p.m. and lasted for 25 minutes. Trump had been president exactly three years.
“These two sleazebags who wrote this book about me—it’s unbelievable. It won’t do well,” Trump said. He was referring to the book A Very Stable Genius written by my two Washington Post colleagues Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. The book was highly critical of Trump. I asked Trump whether he’d read it. “No,” he said. “I just read a review of it.”
Trump returned to the latest polling. A Rasmussen poll showed he had a 51 percent approval rating among likely voters as of January 16th, 2020. He said it was wonderful. And when I pressed on whether he believed the polls, he backtracked, “I don’t. I don’t believe them,” he said. Polling had widely predicted a Hillary Clinton victory in 2016.
I asked him for the letters that he wrote to Kim Jong Un because I had only the letters Kim had written to him.
“Oh, those are so Top Secret,” Trump said. “But I’ll let you see them. I don’t want you to have them all.” I said, well, I want to quote from some of them.
Recent investigations revealed that Trump kept these letters along with other sensitive and top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left office. The National Archives retrieved the letters from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022.
Trump seemed worried. “You can’t mock Kim. I don’t want to get in a fucking nuclear war because you mocked him,” Trump said.
I assured him I was not going to mock the North Korean leader.
Trump returned to the Rucker/Leonnig book. He particularly did not like a scene in the book which suggested that he did not seem to know much about Pearl Harbor. This was revealed during a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial. Rucker and Leonnig reported that his then-chief of staff John Kelly was stunned that Trump did not know the history of Pearl Harbor and needed to have it explained to him.
“They said I don’t know about Pearl Harbor,” Trump told me. “I know everything about Pearl Harbor. How can they say I don’t know?” He then accurately recited some of the history.
Trump claimed it was all made up. I said, look, reporters have sources. This is a good-faith effort. They are excellent reporters. Trump said, “Well, 70 percent of it is made up. Well,” Trump joked, “I have Russia and Sean Hannity with me.”
I asked Trump what he thought of the New York Times editorial page endorsement of Senator Amy Klobuchar and Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Democratic nomination for president. “I so dream about running against Elizabeth Warren,” Trump said, loudly and with apparent sincerity.
Trump was pleased that Henry Kissinger had been in the Oval Office recently and told him how great he looked given impeachment. “During all of Watergate and Nixon’s impeachment investigation, he was a basket case,” Trump alleged Kissinger had told him.
I pushed Trump, once again, to help me talk to Matt Pottinger, his deputy national security adviser. Trump said, “Yeah, call Matt. Tell him to talk to you.”
After this unexpected call from the president, I started to leave handheld recorders around my house within easy reach of the phone. There was one by my bedside table, in the kitchen, by the front door, in the den, and in my office.