Politico: “He offered lengthy meetings in the Oval Office and made phone calls at night from the White House — delivering Bob Woodward an unprecedented nine hours of access across 18 interviews. Aides spent months fretting about President Donald Trump opening up to the famous Watergate journalist, fearing the consequences all the way through Wednesday’s bombshell revelations. Trump bulldozed through them all, believing he could charm the man who helped take down a president and chronicled half a dozen administrations over the past half century.”

“Now Trump’s impulse may cost him as the interview transcripts and recordings are released this week, just under just eight weeks from Election Day and as some Americans start receiving mail-in ballots. The revelations in ‘Rage’ have sent the Trump White House scrambling, with aides blaming each other for the predictable fallout from injecting even more chaos into an already challenging reelection race. ‘You don’t talk the president out of things,’ one White House official said Wednesday, one of 10 current and former White House officials who described the circumstances leading up to the latest book. The interviews revealed that Trump was not candid with the public about the dangers of Covid-19, with the president telling Woodward he was ‘playing it down’ even though it was possibly five times ‘more deadly’ than the flu. ‘I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic,’ Trump said in one audio clip released Wednesday. As the White House and Trump campaign sought to tell a different story this fall about their handling of coronavirus, the book’s release is renewing attention on the president’s early missteps in a crisis that continues to disrupt hundreds of millions of American lives. The book’s rollout will continue this weekend as Woodward sits for a ’60 Minutes’ interview ahead of its wide release on September 15. CBS said Wednesday that the segment will also feature audio recordings of the president’s interviews.”