Donald Trump’s morning is surely off to an angry start Wednesday as Russia responds to reports of a special (and ongoing) relationship between the Republican nominee and Vladimir Putin.
On Tuesday, excerpts from Watergate journalist Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book War accused Trump of gifting Putin a “bunch of Abbott Point of Care COVID test machines for his personal use” at the height of the pandemic, and of holding as many as seven “private” calls with the Russian president after leaving office. Worse for Trump, Putin’s camp is now saying Woodward’s account is at least partially true.
“We also sent equipment at the beginning of the pandemic,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Bloomberg, claiming Russia had indeed received COVID tests from Trump. “But about the phone calls—it’s not true.” Speaking to the New York Times, Peskov called that element of Woodward’s reporting “a typical bogus story in the context of the pre-election political campaign.”
According to Woodward’s version of events, Putin urged Trump, “Please don’t tell anyone you sent this to me,” reminding him that “people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”
If true, Putin had foresight: While Trump’s fondness for the Russian dictator is far from a secret—the two have “a very good relationship,” he bragged this month, while standing alongside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky—it’s also a key talking point for Democrats, who see the friendship as an active security risk.
For a former president to get on the phone with “an avowed adversary of the United States on the opposite side of a war,” as the Times puts it, would certainly be unorthodox. At the same time, the Trump administration did say, in the spring of 2020, that Trump, self-proclaimed “king of ventilators,” was sending COVID equipment to other countries, Russia included. It did not say the U.S. government was sending tests to Putin himself.
But the Trump campaign has been very explicit in refuting all of Woodward’s reporting, with Trump himself telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that the author is “a storyteller. A bad one. And he’s lost his marbles.”
Remarkably, Trump’s is a tamer statement than the one his campaign communications director, Steven Cheung, issued on Tuesday. Calling War the “work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung insisted that “none of these made-up stories … are true.”
He continued: “President Trump gave him absolutely no access for this trash book,” which—in Cheung’s opinion—“either belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore or used as toilet tissue.”
“Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally, and he’s slow, lethargic, incompetent and overall a boring person with no personality,” Cheung added.
