“And then at the end of that conversation, he said, ‘Well, it looks like I didn’t get you on this book. He said, ‘You really think so?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘What about the economy?’ I said, ‘Well, they’re related, as you know,’ and he said, ‘A little bit.’ In astonishment, I said, ‘A little bit?’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, they’re related.’ “And we turned to the virus and I said the election’s about the virus and your handling of it. There’s going to be judgments you’re not going to like.’ I said, ‘Look, the book’s going to be tough.
It’s much like, as somebody said, the Nixon tapes where you see what he’s actually thinking and doing.” He has this kind of savage energy and it comes through in some of the recordings I’ve released. “I’ve been a reporter almost 50 years and I never had an experience like this,” he told the Guardian, discussing his calls with the president. Woodward said then he had needed time to check if Trump’s claims were true. The reporter was criticised in some quarters for keeping such knowledge for his book, which appeared when nearly 200,000 in the US had died. In his last Trump outing, Rage, Woodward scored a huge coup with tape recordings of Trump admitting he had played down the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak. Many reviewers have said the second wave of Trump books failed to include much that was not already known. The current crop of Trump books, also including Frankly, We Did Win This Election by Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal and Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump exposé, have sold strongly but not as well as the first crop which Wolff kicked off with Fire and Fury in January 2018. “This classic study of Washington takes readers deep inside the Trump White House, the Biden White House, the 2020 presidential campaign and the Pentagon and Congress with vivid, eyewitness accounts of what really happened.” His new book with Costa, Simon & Schuster said, is based on more than 200 interviews as well as diaries, secret orders, phone call transcripts, emails and other government records, all producing “a spellbinding and definitive portrait of a nation on the brink”.
The authors of a rash of other Trump books which came out this summer and dominated bestseller lists may disagree with that judgment – not least the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, who also co-wrote a hit, I Alone Can Fix It – but Woodward is undoubtedly a heavyweight in the field. Announcing the title of the new book, which will be published on 21 September, Simon & Schuster said it would “reveal for the first time” how Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and other issues represented “far more than just a domestic political crisis”.
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