The BFD longer video posts are missed by some of us with limited time. The complete 55-minute interview with Doug Wead, author of “Inside Trump’s White House” is fascinating stuff and the following are transcriptions from the first section of the interview.
Setting a new precedent in Trump-bashing, Doug Wead and his family received actual death threats because of Wead’s book. “These are unusual times” said Wead, going on to explain that Trump sanctioned the work to present a factual account of Trump’s tenure to date – in stark contrast to books on Trump riddled with inaccuracies.
“How can you recover from some of these books? They are filled with false stories.”
President Donald Trump to Doug Wead in an Oval Office Meeting
“Anonymous books with anonymous sources… and they have… they’re filled with fake stories so, like everybody else, I read them, and it nags on me – why doesn’t anybody go on record?
So, I wanted to write an official history book because I love history and when historians come back to this time, they’re going to be looking for primary sources, they’re not going to be looking for hearsay and they won’t care what some commentator says on CNN or Fox or anywhere else.
They’re going to want to know ‘what did the President say or what did Jared and Ivanka say, what did Don junior say? What did Tiffany, Lana and Eric – what did they say’?”
Doug Wead Author of Inside Trump’s White House
The President allowed Wead to read (but not reproduce, report on or copy from) Trump’s personal correspondence with Kim Jong Un. Wead says Trump dramatically waved the correspondence in the air telling him “they don’t want me to give this to you, they don’t want you to see this – but I am going to let you read it.”
“I got the clear impression that they [Trump and Kim Jong Un] both realise this is a very dangerous time. They want to make history together. They trust each other’s self-interest, it’s in the self-interest of each side at this time to make history by trying to resolve some of these issues. I got the impression, I think I am limited in what I can say because of what is written, but I got the impression they want to end the Korea war. They want to draw a formal conclusion to that war.”
Wead recounted Trump’s conversation with outgoing Barack Obama.
“Bismarck said, and taught, that politics is the art of the possible, but Donald Trump believes as a businessman – he’s written about it – that a businessman takes on the impossible. You do the most difficult thing first then you move to the next most difficult thing and you work your way down.
With Donald Trump politics… it’s not politics – it’s business! It’s the art of the impossible.
So, in that first conversation with him – it wasn’t my first conversation with him – but in that particular conversation with him, he pointed to the chairs over there and he said ‘See those two chairs over there? I sat right in that chair next to Barack Obama and I asked him ‘what’s the biggest problem you face? What is the biggest problem the United States faces that I will have to deal with?’
And he said, Obama said ‘You will go to war with North Korea during your time in the White House. That will be your biggest problem.’ And I said to him, aah… well, have you called him? And he said ‘No, I haven’t call him, he’s a dictator – he’s a dictator! I haven’t called him – he’s a dictator.’
And then the President looked at me and the others standing in the oval office with him, which was his Deputy Assistant to the President for Communications, Bill Shine, and Sarah Huckerby-Sanders at that time Press Secretary, he looked at all of us and he said ‘Stupid!’
So, I guess that was his instinct – you got a problem with somebody, you call them. And that’s what he did with Kim Jong Un. Against all odds, yeah, yeah. The timing was right and that’s the businessman Trump. He tries things.
Because people said to me, and I had read that the White House was very chaotic, but you know, Sun-Tzu wrote that ‘chaos leads to opportunity’ and that’s surely what happens with Trump.
I went in – I had heard Boris Johnson saying that… I don’t think this is accidental, I think this is calculated, I suspect something’s going on here – this was Morris’s theory of Donald Trump, he just stirs up all the pieces. I came out of the White House convinced that everything is calculated. It doesn’t happen every once in a while, it happens all the time.
I mean, you look at NATO, he just… all the pieces were thrown in the air, the media was going crazy – they were saying ‘he’s destroying… Trump is destroying the oldest treaty we have – these are our closest allies’.
People were meeting with him – he was telling he about it. They’d say ‘Sir, these are our allies, Sir! These are our friends, Sir!’ And he would say ‘If they’re our friends, why are they cheating us?’ ‘They are our friends, Sir.’
‘But they’re cheating us! They signed a treaty, they said they’d paid so much money – they don’t pay anything! We pay it – our middle class pays it! We pay it, so we defend them and they use their money to build high speed railways and new airports and education – they do all of these things. Our middle classes pay for education in Germany and new airports in France. It’s not right. And so, what kind of friends are they?’
So, the media was just in an uproar but what was the end result? The end result was that he raised a hundred million… billion dollars – a hundred billion dollars – think of this, keep that in perspective – it takes 1.6 billion dollars for him to build the wall with Mexico – he raised a hundred billion dollars from NATO in money that the American middle class would have had to pay for – and NATO is stronger than it would ever have been.“
Doug Wead
The complete video interview with Doug Wead can be watched here.
Trump spoke from NATO this week and stirred up journalistic ire by calling out the big talkers but slow contributors to NATO of Germany, France and Canada, threatening them with the economic weapon of most destruction – trade sanctions.
Trump the businessman will hands down beat any politician full of hot air and unfulfilled promises. The book “Inside Trump’s White House” can be found here.