Frank Rich: “If the voluminous press coverage of the widely distributed advance copies are to be believed, Woodward’s Rage is adding details and Trump’s own blithe recorded confirmation to a horrific story that we already knew: The president deliberately falsified and downplayed the epic severity of the pandemic. As Jennifer Szalai writes in her Didion-worthy dissection of Rage in the Times, the book’s portrait of Trump would be ‘immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention.’ In a blow-by-blow account in April, for instance, the Times reported that ‘throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus,’ both ‘top White House advisers’ and experts in Cabinet departments and intelligence agencies were telling him the lethal facts and sounding constant alarms. That’s why by this late date Trump’s indifference to matters of life and death has long since been baked into most voters’ verdicts on this president, including his own voters. Even as the Woodward revelations started to pour out, Trump was brazenly showcasing his immutable callousness and narcissism in public view, violating local mandates (as well as White House guidelines) on mask wearing and social distancing at a rally in North Carolina and conspicuously ignoring the devastation, pain, and suffering as fire tore through America’s most highly populated state.”

“National and battleground-state polling on the presidential election has remained largely stable since before either party’s conventions. One wants to believe that Woodward and Goldberg will move the needle, transforming a Biden lead that still leaves Democrats anxious into an unambiguous rout. In the immediate aftermath of Goldberg’s Atlantic piece, the White House’s panicky, all-hands-on-deck pushback suggested that the Trump campaign was worried. Even Melania Trump’s Twitter account was immediately enlisted in an overnight effort to denounce the article as fake news. But again, you have to wonder if the Atlantic’s additional anecdotes can move voters who have long since absorbed Trump’s contempt for generals, for John McCain’s wartime heroism, and for the Gold Star parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed by a car bomb in Iraq. What gives one a bit of hope about the Woodward book’s ability to sway some of the few still-persuadable voters is the recordings. Trump just couldn’t stop himself from performing for the most bold-faced name among reporters. While we can’t rule out that he may yet claim, as he did about the Access Hollywood video, that the recordings are a hoax, the sheer volume of his verbal diarrhea makes it unlikely that anyone will fall for it except his QAnon faithful. To get voters to listen to them all, Sarah Cooper may have to bring out a box set.”