President Trump told veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he gets along better with “tougher and meaner” foreign leaders than others, according to audio from one of their conversations.
“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” the president told Woodward for his new book, Rage. “You’ll explain that to me someday, okay. But maybe it’s not a bad thing. The easy ones are the ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
The audio of that clip from one of more than a dozen interviews conducted between Woodward, one of the reporters that broke the Watergate scandal, and Trump was aired during NBC’s Today on Monday. In it, Trump also said he gets along “very well” with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
After playing the audio, anchor Savannah Guthrie asked Woodward what he thought when he heard the president’s comments about autocratic leaders and noted that he wrote in his book that former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats had concerns that Russian President Vladimir Putin had dirt on Trump.
“Yes,” Woodward explained. “But Dan Coats, who is the No. 1 intelligence officer in the country, did not have proof. They went through all the intelligence. But he, indeed, harbored that suspicion. But the tape you played about the president saying, ‘Look, I get along with all these bad people. I don’t get along with the good ones.’ As you know, under the Constitution, the president controls foreign relations unilaterally. … He has decided, ‘Oh. I’m going to get along with Putin. I’m going to get along with the crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, MBS. … I’m going to try to get along with Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea.'”
Trump’s relationship with foreign leaders, particularly dictators and autocrats, has long been a cause for consternation among his detractors. The president’s critics have also frequently speculated that Trump could be under the influence of foreign powers such as Russia.
In another excerpt from Woodward’s book, the president said he “saved” Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump said of Salman: “I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
The book also reveals some of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s letters to Trump, including one in which Kim fawned about “that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day.”
Trump has called Woodward’s book a “fake.” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Wednesday that Trump chose to do the interviews with Woodward because he is the “most transparent” president in history.
