(NewsNation) — America is just as divided today under President Joe Biden as it was under Donald Trump and it has stayed that way because Biden has taken a page from Trump’s political playbook, journalist Bob Woodward told NewsNation’s Leland Vittert.
Woodward said Biden has reverted to using the Trump tactic of attacking his opponent’s base of voters in order to gain political traction and there is still an existence of “two Americas.”
“If you listen to what Biden says he will talk about ‘my friends in Congress,’ the Republicans, as you know, he is somebody who tries basically to heal wounds, but you’re exactly right, divisions have become so great that Biden has joined this chorus of, ‘oh, there’s the other side and then there’s us, the good side.’ This is the tragedy in this political moment that we’re living in,” Woodward said.
Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from The Washington Post, is publishing 20 recorded interviews between he and former President Donald Trump that Woodward says show Trump was on a “moral freefall” while in office.
Woodward told NewsNation’s Leland Vittert he wanted to release audio of the interviews because he wanted the public to verify what “stunned” him about the tapes. He described Trump’s voice as “thundering” in his ear and he said there was “something about the power of his voice” he wanted his audience to understand.
“When you look at the overall here, the catastrophe and the tragedy is he does not just understand democracy, and certainly the January 6 committee has covered that,” Woodward said. “But he doesn’t understand the presidency and the moral responsibility he has to the people of this country.”
Woodward, who has published books about multiple U.S. presidents, including Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, concluded at the end of his book on Trump titled “Rage” that Trump was unfit for office. Woodward came to that conclusion after spending hours interviewing Trump.
In his book “Peril,” Woodward analyzed the United States’ transition from Trump to current president Joe Biden, which concluded with a violent insurrection at the capitol at the hands of Trump supporters. Woodward said America became more divided than ever under Trump and remains that way today under Biden.
“We are two Americas and in interviews with Trump, Robert Costa, who was in on the first (book) in 2016, when Trump was only a candidate, asked about when Trump is going to coalition build, because that’s what a president, or that’s what a candidate in one party needs to do. And Trump insists, ‘well, I’ll do that when I win. Winning is everything,'” Woodward said. “Well, winning is not everything. A president has to bring the party together as to bring the country together or make an effort to do that.”
