YouSaid · the spoken record

Carol Leonnig

lines on the record: 105
first: 2020-02-10
most recent: 2020-02-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He was afraid to talk about it because he had political consequences at the time he was running. Being Mormon, right, yeah, being a Mormon with Republican evangelicals, but he's a man of faith, and that guided this decision. And I think Romney would probably argue Trump is not a man of faith by the way Romney is.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did, and he questioned Romney's faith, and then later in the day an east room of the White House, he said Romney uses his religion as a crutch, a political crutch. Romney is one of the most faithful men in politics.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did, and we should keep in mind that Trump has gone after Romney in really ugly ways before, says he walks like a penguin, a total loser for losing the 2012 election. This could be a new level of vitriol. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that Romney should be expelled from the Republican Party, which is a ridiculous statement because it's not up to any presidential”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about that a little bit because he went immediately and went after him. And he said that. And in fact, Mick Rami said it in his speech. He goes, if you think I want these consequences, you've got to be crazy. I know exactly what ugliness is coming at me. But I'm speaking to a higher power, both history and religion and his God. And so I think that was fascinating, but he did talk about it rather explicitly, about that, it's coming.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everyone you don't like, I will go after them. Right. Another way in which, forgive me, but this goes to a question you asked Phil a minute ago about the way our book foreshadows the future. Yesterday, when Mitt Romney started talking about being judged by history, wanting his children and his grandchildren to be able to see that he'd made this decision. He is literally almost the person we're talking about in our epilogue, a person who, Mr Hogan, who in Nixon's Watergate investigation realizes what the president has done and decides this is the one way in which I will be judged by history, how I decide about President Nixon's behavior. And I am going to be the Republican who says no. And that's what Mitt Rodney did as well.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. The other two is the vindictiveness. Like, I will punish or I will go after those who question or threaten or counsel. You know, initially, Kara, at the beginning, we all saw this, but we didn't realize the depth to which it was true. And we learned it in our reporting. There were all these senior advisors who came in with hopes, high hopes, that they were going to guide this apprentice, this novice, and help achieve a conservative agenda, surely, but also advise. those guardrails are gone. So each time he wins, each time he jumps a hurdle, he gets bolder and bolder and bolder still. Another important sort of theme in this is the attack dog feature of the president, which is if, and I guess I've referenced this already, but this attack dog of like, I will be a fighter for you.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think one of the most important ones is we've hit on a little bit, and then I'll move on, but it's that perpetuation of his power, the burnishing of his image. That's number one every day when he wakes up.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fitzpatrick. Talk about those patterns. Talk about the patterns because you have them in this book. And one of the patterns I notice all the time with people today was around the not letting Get through clear or whatever. I have one of those things. And everyone was like, I can't believe this. And I finally was like, Why can't you believe it? It happens all the time, every day. He does something appalling, and you can't believe it because last week he did this. Talk about the patterns that are here that are now what's happening now, and then we'll talk about where it's going. But right now, if you were writing the book, what areas would you focus on?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But, you know, we see this book of very stable genius as the story of this time period and it ends right at the moment when the impeachment inquiry begins. And it doesn't include the things that have happened in the last couple of months by nature of the publishing schedule, but it is such a template for what we've been witnessing just the last few weeks in the Senate trial, all of the actions and behavior and conduct that we've seen from the president fits a pattern. It fits a pattern. Talk about those patterns.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it happens all the time. And then when you're actually covering it, you've written this book, it's a book that can't add more stuff to it. You can add more to a digital copy, presumably. But what does writing a book like this mean anymore? Because since I want to talk about some things that are happening now, but since you wrote the book, there's been like nine more chapters written. Like, how do you? Maybe 19. 19. I'm talking about that. How are you approaching this?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To steer this wall contract to accompany him, and he was out and open tweeting about how great they were. It wasn't like some sort of cover of darkness. Another example is that sort of. Bizarre event where a Montana Tiny whitefish company ends up being in charge of the electrical rebuild regrid of Puerto Rico after the hurricane. It happens to be in the area of a cabinet member in his zone and a friend of his. Just sort of amazing the way in which this kind of corrupting”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm thinking when you're talking, I was thinking about the examples of we all think a president should not steer a contract to a particular vendor. And yet in this administration, there's some evidence”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, this is why it's appealing to people because everybody knows we get into a war, that maybe we shouldn't have gotten into these defense department people then move into the defense industry. Washington has operated in a certain way. And then when you get someone who's just corrupt by nature coming in and just being corrupt, it's sort of not refreshing. It's just like, okay, it's like this whole system sucks.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Right, that's really fun. That was funny. I didn't realize it was a post. You were playing to him by putting it like that. So what is it like then now to report? Because you're sort of, one of the things, I literally can't abhor the Trump administration, but one of the things is it does pull the curtain back on this ridiculous system because so many other White Houses have been so organized and righteous, but there's a lot of stuff that was going on that was bad. You know what I mean? Just bad. And now they can be like righteous about it and everything else. But some of the things that he points out, and I can't believe I'm coming, is like,”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he'll call you. And then I'm on About my chocolate cake and try to take Oh, he's never memory. And I like California. He loves interacting with him. He holds grudges, but doesn't. He loves reporters.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the phone And it's not just the staff who are that way. The president himself is that way. He'll attack us personally and he'll attack the Washington Post. And he'll call you. And then I'm on Air Force One in Nepool one day and he comes back to tease me about my chocolate cake and try to take the cake off my plate, which he did. Oh, he did on a flight from California. He loves interacting with him. Hill's grudges, but does he do?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again Sources. I'm just saying those factions are all and their aids and their deputies. They're all styling like, let me tell you how it really is. Sometimes they review. Of course, we're going to check the facts and vet them and make sure we're not being spun, but sometimes their facts are pretty darn good. And it hurts their rival. And you know what's funny is in the book, we see how President Trump is almost collapsing on the sidelines when everyone is in a Shakespearean way.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything else that the president does, which it makes our job slightly, I mean, it's challenging, but it makes it easier. He encourages factionalization inside his White House. And so the factions that are fighting with each other, whether it's the Javank”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm on this investigative team, and it is a fast moving investigative team. You usually spend several weeks or months really digging into a subject and trying to reveal what's behind the curtain. And in the Trump presidency, it's a much more challenging job because you're revealing what's behind the curtain every 45 minutes, it feels like.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What about for you? You were saying before we started that you're a dirt digger. You just think you're an investigative reporter. What is that one? Right now it's like out on, it's not even, you don't even have to investigate. It's literally on the ground. Like, look, it's done their dead body. Oh, wow, look at that.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nice to like me. And it's ugly. We get threats. We have had to increase security for our reporters at the post. We've had to be careful. About where we go in public and what we do, but we've been become so much more committed to the work. And I think everyone we work with at the White House team, Ashley Parker, Josh Dossey, lots of tremendous reporters. This just motivates us to dig deeper and really hold the people in power accountable.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The campaign, we were not able to have credentials to cover his rallies. So hostility existed before he even became president. But it's a really challenging time. And the most important thing we have is a really strong leader in Marty Barron who sets a tone for all of us. And he says that we should think of covering the Trump administration not as being at war but being at work. We're doing our jobs. We're trying to get answers to our questions. We're trying to shine a light where there's darkness. You may have heard of our slogan. Democracy dies in the darkness, but it's not a joke. I mean, it's really... Serious work, and it can get really ugly. The president has called Carol Life.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I covered the Obama White House as well for the Washington Post. It's very different covering the Trump White House for the Washington Post during the Trump campaign. Washington Post reporters were kicked off.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, except you look at his history, that's what he's done in his whole history. This has been a history of a person who gets out of scrapes, either because he was a rich kid or he's just brazen. I think brazenness.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's also a master marketer. Look at his success. This is a man, as we've described, who triumphed over a criminal investigation that found substantial evidence. He obstructed a criminal probe. Most people go to jail for that. He triumphed over an impeachment process rapidly uncovering facts that showed he tried to engage a foreign power in investigating an American citizen. He triumphed and has been acquitted”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We felt it was important. If we're doing a portrait of the man, lots of people write about this guy. How many thousands of people write about Donald Trump, whether it's in a book or in a newspaper reporting every day people are writing about Donald Trump? But if we're going to do a portrait of him, let's use his description of himself. We want to stress test this definition with the people who know him best, who stand at his shoulder, advise him on the decisions of war, peace, domestic prosperity, the border. in large measure believe he was stable and they did not in large measure believe he was a genius. However, you know, in stress testing it and holding that mirror up to Donald Trump, we did find some people and some characteristics that show he is a genius in some ways.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, a lot of people take issue with this, especially. I love it, it's great. The president hates it. We have heard the president really started it. Well, exactly. He started it. His own word.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To give him a good faith chance to do this, but we did verify everything in the book with everybody else. And if somebody's in the book, they had a chance to corroborate or to correct or to contest or deny the quotes that are in there and the other scenes that are in there.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking specifically about the representatives of the president. Well, you know, we wanted to interview the president himself about all of this. He initially agreed to do an interview, actually. I spoke to him on the phone and he said, come on in, you guys are serious reporters. It's going to be a serious book. I want a book like this done. I'd be happy to talk to you. He pulled back that agreement because the hostility between him and the Washington Post and the press corps writ large had gotten so extreme. So in the final months of our reporting, we knew we probably weren't going to interview the president, but we wanted to get his perspective on things. We wanted to fact check everything in the book involving him. We tried to do that with the White House. We gave them more than a month to get back to us with substantive answers to the episode that we recounted. And his spokespeople in the White House were unable to provide any substantive answers why we're not sure. But the truth is they did not engage the way a normal”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they don't, because they have these jobs that they do, you know, that they have a lot of regard for, that they think are as important to keep having kept the peace over the years. And this is a system that tends to work despite it. Yeah. So when you are doing this, when you're writing this book, what was your dealings with the Trump administration on this going back to them? A lot of loaded things. There was the dono Pearl Harbor. There were like six or seven things that are just appalling.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They see the president's power to come after anyone who speaks truth to him. They see his ability to humiliate and tarnish a reputation, to ruin someone's resume forever. There are people who went to work for this president who cannot get a job because they went to work for him. So imagine if they went to work for him, Annie's coming after them. Who is going to hire you? There's a lot of anxiety about that. I also found it interesting there are people that are much lower down the chain who agreed to speak to us anonymously and would normally run like crazy from reporters. It's not their thing. But in national security and intelligence worlds, they're agreeing to talk to us because it's so upsetting. Right.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're not identifying sources. I just want to stress that, but the people who did speak to us, I mean, they revealed a lot about their motivations. I think they were very honest with us about why. One was this issue of history that Phil described, look, you're going to get it, you're going to get it right. So I want to be part of you getting it right. Number two, the reason they want to be anonymous.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not been a 9 11 or a major sort of world altering event that he has to respond to and deal with. And it's one of the reasons why John Kelly stayed in that job, the most miserable job in any presidency, but especially this one to be the chief of staff at the White House. And he stayed for so long because he saw himself as protecting the country from a president whose decisions are made rashly and impulsively.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, some people say he's narrowly educated. Some of his aides told us he's dangerously misinformed. But he also just doesn't take his briefings. But here he is in that setting. Other things that shocked us, I mean, Just how upset his senior aides were and how worried they are and how lucky they feel we haven't had a real crisis.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Pearl Harbor, and he turns to his chief of staff and says, John, what's this Pearl Harbor? What's this all about? He knows there was a battle at Pearl Harbor, but he doesn't know it's this incredibly historic moment that propels us into World War II. And that lack, as”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the president didn't know, literally turned to his chief of staff on his first trip to Asia, stops off in Hawaii, is about to go visit the memorial essentially to a...”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, he's an SOB, but he's my SOB. He's fighting for them. And lots of times when we, you know, at the post talk to his supporters and say, but, you know, he actually tried to fight against Obamacare that protected you if you had pre-existing conditions. You know, some people would argue his State of the Union address where he talks about that a lot the other night was full of exaggerations and lies. When you ask voters like, well, what do you think? They're like, yeah, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. He's such a great guy. He's really saying what I believe and we need someone to do that.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he doesn't care. And you know what? His supporters don't care either. The Washington Post fact-checker has this running tally throughout the presidency of all the misstatements in life. 15,000? Over 16,000. Now, it is an extraordinary number, and the pace is increasing, which means he's lying even more now than he did in the first year of the presidency. And yet, the tens of millions of people who are part of Maganation and go to his rallies and are going to vote for him in November could care less if he's telling the truth. What do you think that is?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wants to win today. He doesn't care. Right, so he just did it. He just, well, it's like hello, he lied, essentially. Everything is an opportunity not to tell the truth. Or maybe tell the truth or whatever works in the second.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As they're about to publish and they're seeking White House comment, the president decides he is going to tell the New York Times what his son is going to say. He's going to issue the statement essentially on his son's behalf. And he manipulates this story so that it's misleading. It's not about the campaign. It was about adoptions. And he basically makes his son issue the statement. He's warned by his attorneys there are emails that are going to come out in Congress in the next several weeks to months that show that's BS, they don't put it that way. But as one person said to us, that's an eternity to Donald Trump. He wants to win today. He doesn't care about the fall or the late summer. He wants to win this moment.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so he's at the G7 in Germany on the sidelines when a New York Times reporter is learning that there was this meeting, Don Jr., with a Russian lawyer during the campaign at Trump Tower. It's the first time that there would have been a meeting between Russians and Trump's own family, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Kara, I want to add something about that because he said that beautifully, but I would add your question about lying. Many of these sources, which I found so striking, said, yeah, of course the president lies. He lies every day. But one thing they also revealed was this idea that his lies are about winning that moment. And sometimes he doesn't know he's lying. He's just saying to them, hey, when they confront him and say, hey, Mr. President, that's not how it happened. He says, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the big picture, let's focus on the big picture. I'm a big picture guy. But other times he wanted to win the moment and he didn't care about”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really you owe it to history. We are serious reporters. We're doing a serious book. This is going to be the comprehensive story. We're not looking to do an account based on five or six key sources who are narrators. We want everyone's perspective. And if you don't come talk to us and tell us what you saw, tell us your truth. You're going to be left out. And we're not going to have your side of the story. And that was a compelling argument for people. The pull for history was the most important for some of the senior most people, some of whom felt like they didn't want to tell these stories. They didn't write their own books. They feel obliged and duty-bound not to speak out about a president while he's still in office. They feared retribution from the president, but they did so once they realized this was this complete history. And Carolyn I found in the fact-checking process at the end of our book, we would go to sources who did not agree to cooperate with the book to just verify, did you say this?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, the lawyers who were involved in that were losing their minds and screaming at each other like, here we are stuck. It was that kind of, you don't know what you have until you do the reporting and what we had when we did the reporting was a deeper understanding and much more detail about every moment we thought we knew.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, we really wanted to tell history in real time. We were experiencing something we'd never had before, and we all remember that Donald Trump's MO, again, about burnishing his self-image, when we started to actually go back and reach out to these people who wouldn't talk to us in real time for certain stories, when we spoke to them, we realized, here's the material we've got. It's so much more dramatic and rich, even scenes we reported like how he handled the fake statement about the Trump Tower meeting, you know, how he manipulated the press to think that this meeting at the Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer was really just about the campaign. We thought we knew all about that, but actually there was a ton more.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about this because there's been a lot of Trump books. There's been like at least a half a dozen, including from insiders, people who were there. One of his assistants did it. All kinds of people have written these books. And they have shades of this. And obviously Michael Wolf wrote the first one, which had shades of this. How did you want to approach it so we're different? Because I think for some reason your book has really resonated either because you're such good reporters or whatever, but a lot of people have sense of this as what's going on. How did you want to approach this?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the most important thing for Donald Trump from the moment he swore an oath to the Constitution and took office was the perpetuation of his own power. Crises, the chaos that we see in the White House every day is all because he scrambling to survive, he's scrambling to win the new cycle, he's scrambling to escape from the Mueller investigation without any consequences, which he did. He's scrambling to escape from a six-month impeachment proceeding. Happened this week, and it's all about maintaining his grip and promoting his self-image. And he pushes all the buttons in the federal bureaucracy to that end. And if you're a cabinet secretary or a senior official in the bureaucracy and you're not working to perpetuate his power and burnish his image, then you're out.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were. We took some leave. We didn't get a lot of leave because, you know, who wants to let go of any of their reporters during this unprecedented presidency? We got a little bit of leave and we took it. It was generous, at least in this setting. And the way we approached it really was, okay, we could tell you everything about the presidency and everything that happened, but we really wanted to do a portrait of Donald Trump. The more and more we reported, the more people that broke their silence to tell us what happened in the room, we started to see Donald Trump really feel what motivates him, what his North Star is, and what these interviewees told us, these sources told us over and over again is they were distraught not just by the impulsivity of the president, but also the way in which his interests, his self-image, burnishing it was the North Star. It was the decider in the room. It was the central reason.”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real time because often these books are done afterwards and what happened Whatever. There's been so many of them, you know, it goes back to Boys on the bus. There's all kinds of these in real time thing. And obviously the book about the McCain campaign, like, there's so many of it. How did you approach this? As your daily news reporters while you're doing this, right?”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paper who went for the benefit of a history book decided to share their stories. And we feel like that's a unique contribution that this book makes because this is such a historic period and so has been has been. So”
2020-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT