Revelations from journalist Bob Woodward on the ties between Trump and Putin

Bob Woodward has a keen sense of timing. Less than a month before the American presidential election, the veteran journalist from Washington Post is about to publish a new work with a striking titleWar (“war”, Simon & Schuster, 448 pages, untranslated). Tuesday, October 8, several media revealed some salient episodes. This book reviews the management of international crises by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, relying, as usual with Bob Woodward, on a very large number of sources.

One of the revelations concerns the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In 2020, while he was still president, the billionaire would have sent his Russian counterpart the first Covid-19 testing devices then available in the United States. We know that Putin was particularly anxious not to get sick. “I don’t want you to tell anyone about this because people will get angry with you and not me,” the Russian president would have said.

Amazing information

Other astonishing information, delivered by an anonymous aide to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago (Florida): the two men spoke by telephone about half a dozen times after the billionaire’s departure from Maison Banche, in January 2021 This therefore includes the period following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022. Steven Cheung, Donald Trump’s communications director, issued an insulting statement against Bob Woodward, describing him as. “demented”, “slow”, “incompetent”, “lethargic”. His scoops would be adulterated, claims the text, which however does not explicitly deny telephone contacts between the two men. The last, according to the book, would have taken place at the beginning of 2024. An assistant would have been kicked out of Donald Trump’s office, when he wanted to speak with Vladimir Putin.

Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein revealed the Watergate scandal, leading to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, discusses at length the actions and private comments of Joe Biden. The American president would have been critical, for example, of Barack Obama over the annexation of Crimea in 2014. “Barack never took Putin seriously,” Joe Biden would have said. In private, he would have described Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, as a “fucking liar”. In July, he issued a warning: Israel is seen as a “Rogue state”.