Rick Wilson’s latest for Daily Beast is pretty good. Paywalled, so here’s a chunk.

The ads write themselves: First play the tape of Donald, bored and smug in the residence at night on the phone in February with his new bestie Bob admitting the danger of a virus maybe five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” Then the press conferences where he insisted day after day and month after month that COVID was a trifle.

That admission was such a blockbuster that it obscured the news, also from Woodward’s book, that Trump thinks his generals are “a bunch of pussies”—capping a week where he alienated a meaningful fraction of his political base by shitting on America’s war dead and our currently serving troops by wondering aloud just what is in it for them since there’s no real money in service.

Such a blockbuster that it obscured the news about Trump—who is not a smart man—announcing a highly classified program for the development of an “incredible” nuclear weapon. Bragging to Woodward about how “We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before” is ludicrous to the point of slapstick, circa Strangelove.

Finally, the Woodward interview peeled back another layer of Trump’s con game with his rubes: the idea that everything is fake news. The tapes are unspinnably and unequivocally pure Trump. This isn’t some reporter’s interpretation of Trump. This isn’t some editor cherry-picking facts to make Trump look like more of a stooge that he does on his own. This isn’t some headline writer sniping at a president he doesn’t like.

No, this was Donald Trump in an act of stupidity perhaps unparalleled in Washington media history. He tried to play Bob Fucking Woodward. Nothing about these interviews can be unspun or unrung. No matter how gamely his enablers and the comms shop grunt out excuses, his words are there, on tape. This wasn’t a president trying to calmly lead the nation through crisis; this was Trump simply not giving a fuck.