So much for summer reading lists. The White House is going to be spending a good portion of the fall defending President Trump, who is in the midst of a tough reelection fight, from new books that paint him in a generally unflattering light.
Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany faced several questions at a White House briefing last week about an interview the president gave for veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Rage. Trump is quoted telling Woodward that the coronavirus was serious and saying of the pandemic, “I wanted to always play it down.”
“Did President Trump intentionally mislead the American people about the threat of COVID, a pandemic that has now cost the lives of nearly 200,000 Americans?” asked one reporter. “Absolutely not,” McEnany replied. She noted that the rest of the quote was about projecting calm in a national crisis.
Trump’s coronavirus management has emerged as a top issue in his reelection campaign, and his job approval ratings trended downward after the public began to lose confidence in his ability to weather the outbreak. Woodward’s book has given new fodder to Democrats, who made the coronavirus case numbers and death toll a central theme of their national convention as they nominated former Vice President Joe Biden for president. The Republican National Committee circulated a dozen quotes from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government infectious disease expert whose relationship with the president has sometimes been uneasy, in support of the administration to dispute Woodward’s reporting.
Woodward’s isn’t the only literary fusillade being fired at the White House. The president’s erstwhile lawyer and longtime personal fixer Michael Cohen is out with a new book titled Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump. Among its claims are that Trump is serious about serving more than two terms as president despite the 22nd Amendment, that he will pardon himself for any crimes if he loses, and that Cohen’s own work quashing racy personal photos for since-deposed Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. played a role in securing the evangelical influencer’s Trump endorsement in 2016.
“In good time, I would call in this favor, not for me, but for the boss, at a crucial moment on his journey to the presidency,” Cohen writes. Falwell had never been especially important in presidential politics before, but his father and namesake, a linchpin of the modern Christian Right, surely was.
Some sources close to the White House and Trump campaign dismiss Cohen, saying someone convicted of lying to Congress who turned against the president only after having his own legal problems is hardly a credible witness, but there are those who are worried.
“The Cohen book is going to be much worse, and it will get much more play given that he was on the inside for so long,” said a veteran Republican strategist. “I sure hope they are better prepared for that. [Trump] is finally making some inroads with suburban women, and the book has the ability to make all that go away.”
Then, there are the books that seek to revive the Trump-Russia affair, presumed settled by special counsel Robert Mueller’s failure to establish any conspiracy between the president’s campaign and Moscow to swing the 2016 election. But two prominent authors are separately arguing that Mueller’s investigation did not go far enough to determine Trump’s guilt.
In Donald Trump v. the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt argues that the Justice Department blocked Mueller from looking into “Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia” despite the fact “some career FBI counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed … a national security threat.”
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin makes a broader claim in his book True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump: that Mueller was too legalistic and bound up by rules to effectively probe Trump. Neither scrutinizing Trump’s tax returns nor compelling his testimony were, according to Toobin, “the most revealing, and defining, failures of Mueller’s tenure as special counsel.”
Former FBI official Peter Strzok, whose texts with colleague and girlfriend Lisa Page got him removed from the Mueller investigation, is also out with a book of his own entitled Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump. He writes, “We had credible intelligence that Russia possessed the means to have done even more damage to our electoral system in 2016 but had held back.”
The political impact of all these books with the election still nearly two months away is unclear. But for White House and campaign officials, they don’t make for light reading.
