The Trump Tapes, page 29
TRUMP:
Not many.
BW:
Most people are not working.
TRUMP:
No. I just got back. I was—I literally just walked in the door.
BW:
I know that. But people are scrambling at those laboratories. And they can accelerate the process.
TRUMP:
They’re working hard. How are you doing, okay?
BW:
I’m—listen, I’m doing—I am living this, and I am committed to looking at your whole presidency. Mueller.
TRUMP:
By the way, did you see all the stuff that’s been found out with the FBI? This was an attempted takedown of the president of the United States, Bob. Did you see all the stuff that’s come out over the last week?
COMMENTARY: The Justice Department inspector general concluded that the Steele Dossier was so flawed it should never have been used by the FBI as a basis for wiretaps.
TRUMP:
This was a takedown by all these guys. Comey, Brennan. Sleazebags. They’re all sleazebags.
BW:
I understand—
TRUMP:
Here’s the only difference between me and other people. They got caught. They tried to take me down. They got caught. You watch. This was a takedown. The stuff that they found over the last week is beyond anything. You know who’s guilty too?
BW:
Who?
TRUMP:
Obama. Went right to him.
BW:
That’s going to be litigated.
TRUMP:
It went right to him.
BW:
Here’s what I suspect—
TRUMP:
There’s no way they did it without him knowing everything.
BW:
Here’s what I suspect. When this, the virus business is over, you as president of the United States are going to appoint a commission to look at virus, to look at Mueller, to look at that Steele Dossier, and to look at impeachment. All of those things need to be examined. And that’s what I’m trying to do as a lone reporter.
TRUMP:
Good, I love you doing it. You should call up certain people on that, though. There are certain lawyers that have it cold. You should call up—I could give you some names of people—they have this stuff cold.
BW:
Good, give me some names.
TRUMP:
Okay. Well, you can call Jay Sekulow, is one.
BW:
Yes.
TRUMP:
You can call Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel.
BW:
Okay.
TRUMP:
I’ll give you some other names. Why don’t you talk to those two, I’ll give you some other—oh, you know who you should call?
BW:
Who?
TRUMP:
A guy from Judicial Watch named Tom Fenton [sic]. The guy’s a killer.
BW:
Oh yes, I see. Okay.
COMMENTARY: He is referring to Tom Fitton.
TRUMP:
The other one you should call is Gregg Jarrett. He knows this stuff. Just tell them I said—
BW:
I say this to you directly: what happened in the past, it’s getting in the way, I think, of you doing the job—I mean, ask Melania. Is the past—
TRUMP:
Why do you think that, Bob? I think people tried to—this was a coup. This was an attempted and failed coup. Like nobody’s ever seen before in this country and they got caught.
BW:
When I’m done with it, I don’t think that’s what it was. I think it was a series of things that—you know, there’s a momentum. I wrote four books on George W. Bush’s wars. I went through NSC notes, CIA reports. I spent hours with Bush. All of the people.
TRUMP:
Oh, you did?
BW:
And you know why we went—
TRUMP:
Didn’t he come out terribly in those books?
BW:
See, what he did—I mean, the third book was called State of Denial because he got into denial.
TRUMP:
Let me ask you.
BW:
Sir.
TRUMP:
He spent all that time with you.
BW:
Yes.
TRUMP:
And you made him look like a fool, okay, in my opinion.
BW:
No, no, no. I made—look, he had his say. He had his say. He didn’t object.
TRUMP:
Well, that’s the only problem. I hope I’m not wasting a lot of time. Because to be honest, I can think of other things I’d rather be doing.
BW:
I understand. And my job is to find the best obtainable version of the truth—
TRUMP:
Ugh. And in the end you’ll probably write a lousy book. What can I say? I respect you as an author. But if that’s an example, you wrote four books. Bush took—I heard that he took a lot of time with you. He was not a bright man. How he ever got to be president is mind-boggling to me. Mind-boggling.
BW:
Yes, but they went to war in Iraq. His big, defining decision. It was momentum. They kept telling him, oh, it’s going to get easier—
TRUMP:
You know, Bob, that’s the worst decision in the history of our country.
BW:
Well, it’s—it didn’t work out, there’s no—
TRUMP:
Didn’t work out. We spent $8 trillion as of today.
BW:
Well, that’s an inflated number. We spent too much. There’s no question about—
TRUMP:
I’m talking about in the whole Middle East.
BW:
Okay, so your big decision now is what to do with the virus.
TRUMP:
Yeah. All right, I’m comfortable.
BW:
That’s your decision.
TRUMP:
I know. I’m comfortable, Bob. You won’t even know if it’s a good decision probably by the time you come out with the book.
BW:
[laughs] Well, maybe we will. Maybe it’s going to go—
TRUMP:
Well, maybe it’ll go away. But it’s possible you won’t even know about it.
BW:
Yeah, okay.
TRUMP:
You could have a little bit of a flare-up. You know what it does, it flares up a little bit, but it’s much less and you wipe it out fast.
BW:
How many experts like Fauci and Deborah Birx, how many of those other people have you talked to?
TRUMP:
I have others. I have many others.
BW:
Good.
TRUMP:
Well, you know, Fauci got it wrong. Fauci said no problem in late February.
BW:
I understand. I understand.
TRUMP:
Okay, you know, just so we understand. But I like him. He likes me. We have a good relationship. We’ll find out.
BW:
You know he’s become a symbol to lots of people, so you—
TRUMP:
Well, he is, but don’t forget they don’t say that he got it wrong. They don’t ever print that he got it wrong. If I want, I can do that—but I’m not looking to do that to him. I like him.
BW:
I understand that. So you now, when we talked—
TRUMP:
But he did get it wrong. I got it right. I put up a wall, basically I put up a ban on China. I banned people from coming in from China. Fauci was against it. So was everyone else. I turned out to be right. Almost everybody was against me.
COMMENTARY: Again, this is not true at all. I had talked to five participants who were present at the meeting and who unanimously agreed that O’Brien, Pottinger, Fauci, and Redfield supported the China ban.
BW:
Okay now—
TRUMP:
Took a lot of heat.
BW:
—it’s April 13th, so on March 27th, you said publicly, you said, “My priorities are life and safety, then the economy.” And no one reported it. I watched that and I wrote it down. I said, ah, that’s the strategy.
TRUMP:
That’s my priority today. Nothing’s changed.
BW:
Life and safety.
TRUMP:
Life and safety. It’s an interesting term, because I said life and safety. But life is very important, because this thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.
BW:
Yes, yes, exactly. And so—
TRUMP:
Like, a friend of mine died. Very great real estate developer from Manhattan. He died yesterday.
BW:
I know. Listen, students of mine—I teach a journalism seminar—have written me, have had it. And one of the women said she had it, they said she was cured, and they kept coming back with new symptoms. Strange things happened. She had intense headaches—
TRUMP:
So what happened?
BW:
She’s in agony. And they’re telling her, oh, you’re cured now. You’re over it. So this—I mean you’ve said it, this is a monster—
TRUMP:
This rips you apart.
BW:
—this is a scourge. And—
TRUMP:
It is the plague.
BW:
It is the plague. And—
TRUMP:
And Bob, it’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it. I was in the White House a couple of days ago. A meeting of 10 people in the Oval Office. And a guy sneezed, innocently. Not a horrible—just a sneeze. The entire room bailed out, okay? Including me, by the way.
BW:
[laughs] Really?
TRUMP:
No, the room bailed out. I mean, this is a different—
BW:
Well, you’re risking getting it, of course, the way you move around and have those briefings and deal with people. Are you worried about that?
TRUMP:
No, I’m not. I don’t know why I’m not. I’m not.
BW:
Why?
TRUMP:
I don’t know. I’m just not. By the way, how about the oil deal I made over the weekend that everybody said was impossible?
COMMENTARY: Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States brokered a deal between oil-producing countries to cut production in an effort to stabilize oil prices.
BW:
That’s interesting. And you’ve been working with the airlines, too?
TRUMP:
Saving the airlines. The airlines are screwed right now.
BW:
A lot of businesses, a lot of people are screwed.
TRUMP:
How about Boeing? Boeing a year ago was the greatest company anywhere in the world, and then the plane fell out and then they had this.
BW:
Yeah, exactly.
TRUMP:
This isn’t exactly good for Boeing. It’s not like somebody’s going out to buy 50 planes. And that Max plane was not their best.
BW:
[laughs]
TRUMP:
Not their best thing, right? Who would’ve thought Boeing would be—so Boeing is working with us, and the airlines are working with us.
BW:
And so how did Boeing screw up on the Max? They screwed up in their process. They weren’t listening. The CEO was kind of drinking his own Kool-Aid, and he wasn’t going down and walking the floor to find out what was going on. Who tests this?
COMMENTARY: The Boeing 737 Max plane was grounded in 2019 after two fatal crashes.
TRUMP:
And they also made a mistake. They shouldn’t have taken the 737 and enlarged it. The engines became bigger. They hit the runway, they had to move them in. It became a totally different plane.
BW:
And a disaster. So you’ve got the problem that Boeing had, magnified 10,000 times. As we talked about in March, the leadership test—
TRUMP:
Well, in terms of—
BW:
—a lifetime.
TRUMP:
—in terms of the importance of the decision, certainly—
BW:
Yes.
TRUMP:
—but Boeing, boy, what they’ve done to that company, you have no idea. It’s hard to believe.
BW:
Yeah.
COMMENTARY: I had just said I thought the virus problem was 10,000 times worse than the problem of Boeing. He did not challenge me but wanted to talk more about Boeing.
BW:
And so you’ve got your process—you make a—
TRUMP:
[blows a frustrated-sounding raspberry]
BW:
—important point. By the time my book comes out, I may not know the outcome. But I want to know the process.
TRUMP:
All right. What’s your time, what’s your timing?
BW:
My timing is I want to come out in September or October. I’ve talked to Jared about getting those transcripts of the talks with Xi—
TRUMP:
Now think of it: if it’s a bad book, you’re right in front of my election. That’s a beauty.
BW:
Well—
TRUMP:
Look, you know I was not a Bush fan.
BW:
Understand.
TRUMP:
Okay? Not because I dislike him. He’s been very nice, actually. But I thought he was, you know, totally unqualified for this job. But he—I never saw anything like it. And I wasn’t a big fan. The only reason that the father got a good funeral was because of me. Because they figured by building up Bush, that makes me look bad. You understand?
BW:
Sure, no, no, let’s hope we all have good funerals, right?
TRUMP:
I think it’s okay. I don’t care.
BW:
Yeah, I think here’s what I do, if I may share this, Mr. President. I get up in the morning and I say to myself, what’s hidden? What don’t I know? And I say, these are the six people I have to talk to today. I’m not going to bed until I talk to them. And it’s amazing how the—
TRUMP:
No, you’re relentless, there’s no question. You’re a relentless man.
BW:
And, but that’s the way—
TRUMP:
We almost did this book 25 years ago, I guess. Right? Who would’ve thought—did you ever think, sitting in the office in Trump Tower, you’d be talking to a guy that’s going to be president someday? [both laugh] Who would’ve thought?
BW:
I didn’t. I told you—
TRUMP:
That’s—You know what, that’s a very interesting story.
BW:
Yes. Bernstein saw it though. I’m sorry. He said, this guy’s really interesting. And I said, but it’s business, it’s not—
TRUMP:
Well, you should say that.
BW:
I’ve said it. I’ve told you, I’ve told—
TRUMP:
No, but I don’t mean that. You should say it in this book. You didn’t say it in the last book.
BW:
Yeah. That’s right. I should.
TRUMP:
Which was horrendous, but that was my fault.
BW:
No, no, that was my—
TRUMP:
That was my fault. I mean, I would’ve loved to have seen you. But they didn’t tell me you were calling. And you know, we were rather busy, don’t forget. They were trying to impeach me.
BW:
But this—
TRUMP:
They were trying to get me with the fake Mueller report. They were trying to get me with the fake dossier.
BW:
Do you remember when the dossier came—
TRUMP:
So in all fairness to you, Bob, so when you called up, you want to do a book, it’s not like, gee whiz, let’s talk to him. Do you understand?
BW:
Understand, understand.
TRUMP:
When you called me on—now it’s a much different ballgame. When you called me last time, I was under siege. Okay, so here’s a thing that’s interesting. I come in, and I learned that I’m being investigated by scumbags that are in the previous administration. And I learned that they are trying to do a number, and I figure out that they’re trying to take me down. Now it’s very interesting. So then they say, oh, the White House is chaotic. Well, if you had a White House where your chief of staff got three subpoenas on the 10th day, where your many people that you know and deal with got subpoenaed to appear before grand juries with scumbags, if you had a White House where all of this activity was an illegal attempt to take down the president of the United States, I think I probably had the calmest White House in history.
BW:
I’m going to tell you, when I’m all done—
TRUMP:
Because nobody else could’ve done what I’ve done, and nobody else—there’s no president that’s done what I’ve done in my first three and a half years. No president…
TRUMP:
I hope you treat me better than Bush, because you made him look like a stupid moron, which he was. Anyway, Bob, you take care of yourself, okay?
BW:
Okay. Okay. You take care. I’ll be in touch. I will contact those people—
TRUMP:
Remember, no president has done what I’ve done in three and a half years.
BW:
Well, you’re going to be—
TRUMP:
I just signed my 242nd judge.
BW:
Sir, you’re going to be judged by how you handle the virus.
TRUMP:
I disagree.
BW:
No.
TRUMP:
It’ll be a part of it, but I’ve done a lot of other things, too.
BW:
It’s so monumental.
TRUMP:
I agree. It’s a war. It is a war. It’s like being attacked. You know the term I use is the invisible enemy—
BW:
Yes. Yeah, it is a war—
TRUMP:
—which now people pick up, you know what I mean.
BW:
Yes, right. A scourge. You call it the scourge, and it is.
TRUMP:
I was the first one. I call it the plague. I call it the scourge.
BW:
And when it’s all—I mean, this—
TRUMP:
I agree, but I’m not going to be judged entirely by that. But that’s okay.
