Trump secretly sent COVID tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, Bob Woodward's new book says - The Boston Globe

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

41% : "Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024," Woodward writes in the book, "War," which is set to be released Oct. 15.
41% : "Oh, no," Trump replied, "if you're in this room, you're talking."
40% : During a high-level meeting about Afghanistan held at one point in the Situation Room, Trump went around the table to ask everyone's opinion.
38% : The book also examines the long shadow cast by Trump over the foreign conflicts of the past four years, and over the bitter U.S. political environment in which they have unfolded.
38% : This past spring, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was able to persuade Trump to soften his stance, according to Woodward, not by showing him that Ukraine's cause was just, but by convincing him that the aid package would help the Republican conference's electoral chances and thus benefit him personally in the run-up to the November election.
37% : During a March visit by the senator to Riyadh, which is recounted by Woodward, Graham proposed a phone call with Trump, so the crown prince pulled out a burner phone labeled "TRUMP 45."
32% : But the unnamed Trump aide cited in the book indicated that the GOP standard-bearer may have spoken to Putin as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
32% : Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, makes several appearances in the narrative, with Woodward presenting her as a shrewd and loyal No. 2 to Biden but not an influential voice in his administration's foreign policy.
28% : During the March call with Trump, conducted by the crown prince over speakerphone while Graham was present, the former president teased the senator for once calling for the Saudi royal's ouster over the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA concluded Mohammed had ordered.
26% : Blinken, reports Woodward, warned Biden in the private dining room off the Oval Office that everyone's legacy is reduced to a single sentence -- and that, if he continued to campaign and lost to Trump, that would be his legacy.
19% : Reacting to the prosecution of his son Hunter -- by a special prosecutor named by Garland amid partisan recriminations over the Justice Department's prosecution of Trump -- the president told an associate, "Should never have picked Garland.
14% : Putin, according to the book, told Trump, "I don't want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me."Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine.
13% : With publication on the eve of the presidential election, Woodward, who has chronicled the successes and failures of U.S. presidents for 50 years, concludes that Trump is unfit for office while President Joe Biden and his team, mistakes notwithstanding, exhibited "steady and purposeful leadership."
6% : These interactions between Trump and the authoritarian leader of a country at war with an American ally form the basis of Woodward's conclusion that Trump is worse than Richard M. Nixon, whose presidency was undone by the Watergate scandal exposed a half-century ago by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein.

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