President Trump on Tuesday dismissed Bob Woodward’s bombshell tell-all — which depicted an administration in chaos and the president as clueless on many major issues.
“It’s just another bad book. He’s had a lot of credibility problems,” Trump told the conservative website The Daily Caller about the famed Watergate journalist, who has written books about several presidents and who said he had hundreds of hours of recordings of his interviews.
“I probably would have preferred to speak to him, but maybe not. I think it probably wouldn’t have made a difference in the book. He wanted to write the book a certain way,” he continued.
Trump never spoke to Woodward, who said he made “six or seven” requests for a sitdown, according to audio of a phone conversation last month between the famed Watergate journalist and the president.
“It’s just nasty stuff. I never spoke to him. Maybe I wasn’t given messages that he called. I probably would have spoken to him if he’d called, if he’d gotten through. For some reason I didn’t get messages on it.”
Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly put the kibosh on an interview, still fuming at previous tell-alls by Michael Wolf and Omarosa Manigault Newman.
Trump denied that top aides, including former National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, took papers from his desk to keep him from pulling out of NAFTA and a trade deal with South Korea.
“That’s false” and “it’s just made up,” he said, adding that “there was nobody taking anything from me.”
The president guessed that the criticism in the book could have come from “disgruntled employees or just made up by the author.”