Been wondering why Trump talked to Woodward at all? I sort of wondered, before other things replaced it.

Trump was piqued that he did not take part in Woodward’s previous book, Fear, which reached damning conclusions about his administration, so was determined to give his version of events for Rage.

Because he’s too dim and too narcissistic – both! – to realize that his version would only damn him further.

As Woodward recalls of this “surreal time” starting last December, Trump initiated seven phone calls, sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at weekends. The author had to keep a tape recorder to hand at all times.

10 pm. Who the hell calls people – non-intimates – at 10 pm?

Stupid question. Trump. It’s a wonder he didn’t call at 2 a.m.

Apparently he wanders around the White House at night because he’s got nothing to do.

“I call him the night prowler. I think it’s true. He doesn’t drink. He has this kind of savage energy and it comes through in some of the recordings I’ve released. It comes through in his rallies. So for me, it’s a window into his mind. It’s much like, as somebody said, the Nixon tapes where you see what he’s actually thinking and doing.”

As one journalist observed on MSNBC: “Trump is the first candidate for president to launch an October surprise against himself. It’s as if Nixon sent the Nixon tapes to Woodward in an envelope by FedEx.”

The other defining issue of the year [along with the pandemic] has been an uprising against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis in May. In one interview, Woodward confronted Trump about the need both men have to step into someone else’s shoes.

That is, to try to imagine what it would be like to be someone else, with different life circumstances.

“I said, ‘Look, I am somebody who comes from white privilege.’ My father was a lawyer and a judge in Illinois, and I reminded Trump he came from this white privilege also, and I just asked do you understand the anger and pain that particularly Black people feel in this country? He just mocks me and he says, ‘No, you really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you, wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.’”

No, you callous shit, it’s not that we drank any Kool-Aid, it’s that you are too deficient in intelligence and empathy even to grasp that you are where you are because of where you started from.

“It’s about the awareness of what’s going on in the country that he governs. The Black Lives Matter movement was a slap in the face for all of us, particularly white privilege. It was all around us, it was obvious, there was articulation of it. There was support for it by white people.

“It’s a revolution of sorts and you connect directly to the civil rights movement and the awareness of what was going on and he didn’t understand it. He said, ‘Law and order, Bob, law and order, that’s what we’re going to do.’ Well, OK, there’s a problem there and it needs to be addressed very seriously, but law and order’s not enough.”

Oh no, you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, you’re Woke, you’re virtue signalling, you’re antifa, yadda yadda yadda yadda.

Associate editor of the Washington Post, where he has worked for 49 years, Woodward is a shoe leather reporter of the old school for whom the border between fact and opinion is sacrosanct – the antithesis of journalists who flood social media with “hot takes”. So it is all the more surprising and striking that, in the book’s final sentence, he reaches an unequivocal conclusion: “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

He explains by phone: “You have to tell the truth and you can’t dodge that if that’s what you believe the truth to be. As a reporter, one plus one equals two: you can say that. And this is factual. It’s overwhelming. It’s incontrovertible and, as people are saying, it’s bulletproof. So I left it in.”

I think that’s right, but I can also see ways to poke holes in it. It depends on what you think the job is, and how you define “wrong.” What if the job is to consolidate Republicans’ grip on power for years into the future? What if the job is to undermine the US to help Putin consolidate his power? What if the job is to make the rich richer and everyone else much poorer? Or to make American White again? Or to destroy environmental and safety regulations and crush the few remaining unions? Or to reduce the population? Or to make racists feel at home?

It all depends on where you’re standing.