I’m Bob Woodward. I’m doing something here that I’ve never done before, presenting the lengthy, raw interviews of my work. In the fall of 2019 through August 2020, I interviewed President Trump 19 times for my second book on his presidency, Rage. I had also interviewed him in 2016 when he was a presidential candidate.
I decided to take this unusual step of releasing these recordings after relistening in full to all 20 interviews earlier this year. Information from these tapes was used in Rage, but as I listened to them again I was stunned by their relevance to understanding Trump. Hearing Trump speak is a completely different experience to reading the transcripts or listening to snatches of interviews on television or the internet.
You will hear Trump as I did. Raw, profane. Divisive and deceptive. His language is often retaliatory. He pledges to even the score with his detractors and enemies. He is angry, feels abused and completely misunderstood. Yet, you will also hear him engaging and entertaining, laughing, ever the host. He is trying to win me over, sell his presidency to me. The full-time salesman.
I hope that you will feel you are in the Oval Office with me as Trump slams the Resolute Desk, or at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, as he plays concierge to his guests, including me. Or experience my surprise when Trump calls me at home out of the blue.
Trump’s voice is a concussive instrument. It is fast and loud. He hits hard or will lower his voice to underscore for effect. He is staggeringly incautious. And at times staggeringly repetitive, as if saying something often and loud enough will make something true.
During these interviews, I question and at times fact-check the president. But you will also hear me listen without interrupting even when I know what he says is wrong or unsupported. This is because I wanted to hear everything he had to say. Having an argument would not have achieved that purpose. In my book Rage, I only used information I was able to verify and in other cases I pointed out when he was inaccurate.
Here in this audiobook, I at times break frame from the interviews to add commentary to provide essential context or clarification. But for the most part the interviews proceed uninterrupted. When you hear Trump in his own words, in his own voice, it is an up-close, unvarnished self-portrait of him and his presidency.
I wanted to put as much of Trump’s voice, his own words, out there for the historical record and so people could hear and judge and make their own assessments.
All interviews were recorded with his permission. To improve clarity, we have edited out excessive repetition, irrelevant material, background noise, and unintelligible audio.
Our interviews took place during one of the most consequential years in American history. Trump was impeached, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and the murder of George Floyd sparked the largest racial justice protests in the United States since the civil rights movement. I pressed Trump on these topics as well as foreign policy and the economy. At times our discussions were heated. I often expected each interview to be our last. But the president kept calling and he continued to answer my calls.
On re-listening to the tapes, I discovered something surprising to me, which I had not realized at the time. I had become entangled in the disorder of Trump’s presidency. Knowing that he could call at any time and knowing that I could call him and inquire about anything—including the events of that day—was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but it was also unnerving. Trump became the primary focus of my life for nine months.
After my book Rage was published in 2020, two months before the presidential election, Trump said publicly, “it was a political hit job.” He also said:
TRUMP:
From the vantage of August 2022, it is, of course impossible to know the outcome of Trump’s political future and the future of Trumpism. The midterm congressional elections loom. The January 6 Committee is still investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And many criminal and civil investigations into Trump’s conduct are ongoing, including the FBI search in August of his Mar-a-Lago estate to recover documents Trump took from the White House.
Some of the documents at the center of Trump’s disputes with the National Archives and the Justice Department were first revealed during these interviews and quoted in my book Rage. The extraordinary letters between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are, for example, discussed extensively in these tapes.
But after Trump’s four years as president, there is no turning back for American politics. Trump was and perhaps still is a huge force and indelible presence.
“On history’s clock it was sunset,” the brilliant author Barbara Tuchman wrote of 1914 before World War I in her book The Guns of August. Just over a century later, the year 2016 and the election of Trump as president turned out to be another sunset. The old political order was dying and is now dead.