If there’s one thing we have learned about Donald Trump in the past several years, it’s that he has rarely passed on an opportunity to sit down with a reporter and talk endlessly about himself. As we’ve seen with Maggie Haberman’s recent book, Confidence Man, the former president doesn’t always think too highly of what he said when it’s over. So Bob Woodward, one half of the famed Woodward and Bernstein, who blew the lid off Watergate, made the ingenious move of releasing a new audiobook that includes hours of Trump telling his own story — and dropping some wild tidbits along the way. On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel couldn’t wait to get right into it.
The audio comes from a whopping 20 interviews Woodward conducted with Trump, one before his election and the remaining 19 during Trump’s final year as president. “According to Woodward, Trump would call him randomly at unexpected hours to talk while he was president,” Kimmel said. “‘Cause there’s nothing he likes doing more than talking about himself; it’s his version of phone sex.”
The part that really flabbergasted Kimmel was when the topic turned to COVID, and Trump admitted that he was having trouble talking to his own son Barron, who was 13 at the time, about it. So he asked Woodward — “the guy who was interviewing him,” remarked Kimmel — what he should do about the coronavirus. Fortunately, Woodward had a step-by-step list of how he’d handle the then-impending health crisis, which Trump asked him to read out loud to him. So… Woodward did. And Kimmel was shocked:
Can you imagine that this happened? I mean, I can’t even believe [it]. Trump also told Woodward he was hesitant to release a plan for the pandemic for fear it might not be politically beneficial…
‘Why did grandma die?’
‘Well, because the president has a super-cool ‘Bring Me a Diet Coke’ button on his desk, and he didn’t want to lose that.’
Later in the interview, a pre-presidential Trump claimed that when he won the election (which he had no doubt would happen), he would “be so presidential you won’t even recognize me… You’ll be falling asleep you’ll be so bored.”
“It’s kind of amazing that he was right about almost nothing he said,” Kimmel noted.
Trump went on to tout his abilities as a unifier — a skill be (erroneously) believed Obama was sorely lacking. Then tried to prove his own intelligence by noting that his uncle was a professor at MIT for 40 years, and that his father was even smarter than him. Which… ok.
Trump’s only recourse, of courts, was to post to TRUTH Social in an attempt to set the record straight. He railed against Woodward, who he claims never got permission to release those tapes, which Trump had “allowed only for purposes of making sure that he got my quotes and statements right for THE WRITTEN WORD. In other words, for his nevertheless highly inaccurate book. The tapes are much better than the book.”
So, does he like the tapes or not? It’s hard to tell. But Kimmel loves the idea of Trump claiming that the words that came out of his mouth are all Woodward’s fault. “Why are you agreeing to do 20 interviews on tape with the guy who took down Richard Nixon with tapes?,” Kimmel wanted to know, then concluded: “The emperor has no brains.”
You can watch the full clip above.
