Just how much brain damage did Donald Trump’s Walter Reed incident do?
When Bob Woodward approached Donald Trump about participating in his new 2020 book, Trump was so excited by the idea that he ended up doing a whopping eighteen on-the-record interviews with Woodward. It’s clear that Trump trusted Woodward, and was expecting Woodward to write a positive book about him.
Here’s the thing. This isn’t the first book that Bob Woodward has written about Donald Trump’s presidency. In fact Trump didn’t like the last one at all. On September 7th, 2018, Trump posted this tweet: “The Woodward book is a scam. I don’t talk the way I am quoted. If I did I would not have been elected President. These quotes were made up. The author uses every trick in the book to demean and belittle. I wish the people could see the real facts – and our country is doing GREAT!”
So the timeline is that Trump spoke on the record with Woodward in 2018, then hated the final result so much that he went so far as publicly accusing Woodward of having made up fake quotes from him, and then Trump forgot about all of this in 2020 and decided to give Woodward eighteen more interviews for his next book.
This strongly suggests that by the time Donald Trump agreed in early 2020 to participate in Woodward’s second book, he had completely forgotten about how his 2018 interactions with Woodward went down and how it left him feeling. It’s worth noting that Trump’s emergency trip to Walter Reed Medical Center and alleged series of mini-strokes took place at the end of 2019, just two months before Trump began blabbing to Woodward in early 2020. Either Trump lost the memories of his earlier dealings with Woodward, or he lost the capacity to understand what was even happening.
