On MSNBC Thursday, speaking to Ari Melber, veteran reporter Bob Woodward opened up more about his taped conversations with former President Donald Trump — and how they reveal the former president's inability to understand the "obligations" he had as the leader of the free world.
Woodward, who previously discussed how Trump made his national security team's job a living hell, focused in on a specific line in which he took credit for everything the people under him did.
"That goes to something that is really attention right now as we head into this moment, the midterms," said anchor Ari Melber. "It's something your work has explored, which is whether we can remain a nation bound by the law with the imperfections that exist, or whether we descend into something else. And it's striking that Trump, who's been known to echo and sometimes plagiarize aspects of past campaigns, he certainly got the message about law and order. Many people argue he was not a uniformly egalitarian commander-in-chief, in that sense of dealing equally with everyone. But here's an exchange about law and order." He played a clip of Woodward's interview.
"Did somebody help you?" asked Woodward. "Yeah, yeah, I get people, they come up with ideas," said Trump. "But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine."
"What's going on there?," asked Melber of the quote, one of many that has driven intense press scrutiny.
"Well, too much," said Woodward. "I have never heard anybody in the presidency even talk about that and think that somehow there is ownership in this. And the tragedy in all of this, when you go through all those audio tapes and the discovery, how he covered up the warning he got in January about the virus coming — Trump does and did not — this is nine months when he's in office when I'm having these conversations with him. He didn't understand the presidency and the obligations to the people. You have to — this isn't about yourself, but you see, when he says, everything is mine, it kind of echoes this idea of the presidency is his. And we now even see him claiming that he won, when there's no evidence to support that."
Bob Woodward says Trump didn't understand his "obligations to the people"www.youtube.com
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