“I talk to anybody. I always call it my
“I speak to the construction workers and the cabdrivers, and those are the people I get along with best anyway in many respects. I speak to everybody…. You’ve got to know your audience, and by the way, for some people, be a killer, for some people, be all candy. For some people, different. For some people, both.”
Said Donald Trump in 1989, talking to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in “A lost Trump interview comes back to life/The yet-to-be-president holds forth on strength, friendship, dealmaking, public service and building violations” (WaPo)(free-access link, so you can read it all and click on the recordings).
Woodward — who’s pushing his new book from which this is an excerpt — exclaims “What a remarkable time capsule, a full psychological study of a man, then a 42-year-old Manhattan real estate king.”
I think Trump comes across very positively, so thanks to The Washington Post for making this available.
Here’s one more Trump quote, short and sweet: “I believe in having great friends and great enemies.”
Great enemies. That’s so funny — makes me think of Batman, James Bond — and Trump does have great enemies. Putin. Pelosi. Who else? The big categories: establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats. But who are the individuals? Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris really aren’t that great, as enemies… or even opponents. He needs someone he can really go big with.
Putin is big, and yet he can’t go big with Putin. He has to be trickier, tricky enough that people would say Putin is his great friend, not his great enemy. But there’s the idea: “for some people, be a killer, for some people, be all candy…. For some people, both.”
Here’s the commission-earned link for Woodward’s book: “War.”