Donald Trump’s campaign issued a wild statement Tuesday attacking Watergate reporter Bob Woodward over his new book, which contains a series of potentially damaging revelations about the ex-president.
The book, War, is due to be published next week and claims Trump secretly sent COVID testing equipment to Vladimir Putin when the devices weren’t widely available. It also cites an aide who says Trump and Putin may have spoken on the phone as many as seven times since Trump left office.
“None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Woodward is an angry, little man and is clearly upset because President Trump is successfully suing him because of the unauthorized publishing of recordings he made previously. President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book.”
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Cheung ended his unhinged remarks by calling Woodward “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”
The Kremlin likewise denied the book’s claims.
“This is not true,” spokesperson Dmitri Peskov told the New York Times. “It’s a typical bogus story in the context of the pre-election political campaign.”
Trump has drawn scrutiny for his amiable relationship with the Russian leader since his first term in office, and Woodward’s account will only fuel concerns about their chumminess less then a month out from Trump’s bout against Democratic foe Kamala Harris.
During his debate against Harris in September, Trump twice refused to say he hoped for a Ukraine victory in its war against Russia.
It isn’t the first time Trump has made news for appearing in one of the 81-year-old legendary journalist’s books, which often make bombshell claims based on—as in this case—high-level, unnamed sources.
In 2020, amid the COVID pandemic, Woodward published Rage, a book that featured taped interviews not between the author and anonymous source—but Trump himself.
Trump admitted to Woodward that he thought the virus “more deadly” than the flu, even as, at the same time, he tried to compare the two.
In a later interview, as Covid struck hard in New York City, he told Woodward that he wanted to “play it down.”
Trump reportedly read that book in one night but found it “very boring.”
