As its title suggests, the book is largely devoted to war – and more precisely to the wars that haunt Washington in 2024: Ukraine, of course, but also the Middle East. The first is an opportunity for Woodward to once again shine the spotlight on Donald Trump’s unique relationship with Vladimir Putin. He exposes their proximity by reporting that the first secretly sent the second, terrified at the idea of being contaminated, Covid-19 screening equipment. And that Trump would have had at least seven telephone conversations with Putin after leaving office in January 2021.
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Make witnesses speak
The author draws his information from hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of witnesses who most often remain anonymous – like the one who is at the origin of the revelations on telephone exchanges with the Kremlin: we know that he was an aide to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence. Some have mocked the journalist’s propensity to produce sensational stories that sell well. Others do not fail to point out that Woodward’s scoops were often subsequently confirmed, the man’s notoriety guaranteeing him access to sources that not everyone has.
This time Bob Woodward was unable to question Donald Trump. He had done so for a previous work, “Rage”, published in 2021, but the ex-President has since sued him on the grounds that he would have vainly forbidden him to publish the recordings of the interviews – which the journalist disputes. The former President and his campaign team unsurprisingly brushed aside the new revelations, denouncing the author’s “fertile imagination”, overwhelmed with insults, but without precisely denying the accusations made.
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Privileged partner or useful idiot
We know that Donald Trump has always flattered himself about the privileged relationship he believes he has with Vladimir Putin – his detractors think that he has above all become, for the Russian president, a “useful idiot”. He now claims that, with these personal connections, he could end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, and even before his possible swearing-in. At the same time, the former American president continued to denigrate NATO, going so far as to say that he would happily abandon to their fate – and to the hubris of Moscow – the “bad payers” within of the Alliance.
If it is normal for former presidents to continue to associate with foreign leaders, especially when they are, like Donald Trump, candidates for re-election, it is appropriate that these interactions be made public, or even that they be previously authorized by the White House or the State Department, when they resemble private diplomacy. Contacts, especially clandestine ones, with representatives of powers considered enemies, are of a completely different nature. Some see this as a possible violation of the “Logan Act”, a law adopted in 1799 to prohibit any parallel diplomacy likely to complicate or compromise government action.
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The prowess of American spies
In the Russian-Ukrainian context, Donald Trump’s steps are all the more embarrassing as he took the opposite view of the Biden Administration by opposing the continuation of American aid. One of the most interesting passages in Woodward’s book concerns precisely the genesis of the conflict: the author highlights the phenomenal success of the American intelligence services which had become certain that the Kremlin was going to launch a large-scale attack. Joe Biden struggled to believe it, and Volodymyr Zelensky even more so.
Bob Woodward says that Joe Biden considered, in private, that if we had reached this point, it was because Barack Obama had let it happen after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He assures that the President feared the appeal Russians with nuclear weapons (the probability was estimated at 50-50), and that he got angry more than once against this “fucking Putin”. But we are more surprised to learn that Joe Biden also used the expression against his old friend Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he also described, after the offensive on Gaza, as a “son of a bitch” and “fucking liar”…
