"A president should be able to bring out the best in people." You think?

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Woodward on Trump: 'I’m not so sure we need a president who brings out rage in people'
By Jimmy Vielkind, September 1, 2016

Bob Woodward has chronicled eight presidential administrations, written 18 books and interviewed countless senior government officials, but Donald Trump was the most self-calibrating person he ever met.

“I have never interviewed someone who is so skillful at measuring the reaction to himself,” Woodward, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Watergate scandal, told POLITICO New York.

Woodward said he first met Trump in the 1980s with his colleague, Carl Bernstein, and most recently interviewed him in April, just as Trump’s implausible presidential bid was running away from John Kasich and Ted Cruz.

“There’s nothing hostile or aggressive or nasty in that kind of sit-down interview — at least in the one we did. It’s not what you see at the rallies. He’s trying to answer the questions,” Woodward said. “He said some things that really astounded me. I guess, most vividly, he said ‘I bring out rage in people,’ almost as if he was proud of it. I’m not so sure we need a president who brings out rage in people. A president should be able to bring out the best in people. So that’s an aspect of his character that obviously we’ve seen in his campaign that’s giving a lot of people pause.”

The longtime Washington Post reporter spoke with POLITICO New York ahead of a Sept. 22 address to the annual conference of the Business Council of New York State. Woodward said he’ll offer remarks about the evolution of the presidency — now more powerful than ever — in a speech that’s “a bit of a history lesson but also it will go to the current contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”

Woodward was less histrionic than some commentators about the state of the race, and found fault with both major candidates. He’s questioned what Trump would do if elected, confused by the candidate’s meandering statements on various policy areas. And he has faulted Clinton, whom he first met when she was first lady, for holding back details on a private email server.

“The experience of the ‘90s and this decade have driven her to a bunker, to a certain extent,” he said. “She’s much more careful, and I think that at times conveys the feeling she’s not telling the full story. That harms her. She would be much better if she was in the form of when I first met her.”

The same idea applies to Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Woodward said a common theme among politicians, proven in Watergate, is that “politicians feel so often they can’t trust the public with the truth.”

“It makes people nervous. They remember the Lyndon Johnson of the Vietnam War, the Nixon of Watergate — they want to feel they’re getting the straight story,” he said. “When some politician, some public figure comes forward and says, here’s what’s going on, it’s a breath of fresh air in this environment of nasty, nasty back-and-forth.”
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