Former U.S. President Donald Trump boasted about him being tougher than past presidents, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, while he was facing impeachment, audio clips shared by CNN showed.
What Happened: The clips are part of tapping conversations between veteran journalist Bob Woodward and the former president between 2016 and 2020. All 20 conversations are to be released by CNN as an audiobook titled, “Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Trump” on Oct. 25. It has a running duration of over eight hours, CNN said.
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In a particular conversation, Trump was heard bragging about how tough he is, stating "nobody's tougher than me."
“I’m under impeachment and you said you just act like you just won the f***king race,” he said.
Trump substantiated this by saying that Nixon was in a corner with his “thumb in his mouth.”
“Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I just do things. Okay?”
Trump is the only U.S. president who faced impeachment twice, once in December 2019 in the aftermath of the Ukraine scandal and the second time in January 2021 for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
While Clinton was impeached in Jan. 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Nixon resigned before his impeachment in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
In another recording, Trump boasted about having built a weapons system that “nobody ever had in this country before.”
“We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that [Vladimir] Putin and Xi [Jinping] had never heard about before,” he said.
Trump also justified having a good relationship with Russia, adding that the latter had “1,322 nuclear f***ing warheads.”
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