Get busy in december 2019.

Longtime Washington post journalist bob Woodward asked then President donald trump to explain his strategic thinking in regards to his taunts on twitter aimed at north korean leader kim jong un Had it all been a carefully calibrated effort to get him to the bargaining table?

Asked Woodward.

No, no it was designed for whatever reason, it was designed who knows trump, responded, adding instinctively.

Let's talk instinct okay, because it's really about you don't know what's going to happen.

But it was very rough rhetoric.

The roughest trump then told the staff to show Woodward his photos with kim at the demilitarized zone that divides north and south Korea.

That's the line right trump told Woodward, then I walked over the line.

Pretty cool, you know.

Pretty cool.

Right?

Yeah.

Pretty cool.

That interaction is part of a forthcoming audio book from Woodward that CNN obtained called the trump tapes which contains 20 interviews that Woodward conducted with trump from 2016 through 2020.

Let me just pause here for a minute with the potential of starting a conflict with a country that possesses nuclear weapons trump acted based on his gut alone.

There was no short term or long term plan beyond instinct.

But he did it anyway with the roughest rhetoric.

So he's got that going for him which is nice.

This episode offers conclusive evidence that the notion that Trump has been operating on a different and higher strategic plane was always deeply misguided in the immediate aftermath of his 2016 election victory.

And throughout his presidency there were those, most of the Republicans, but more than a few democrats as well who argued that every odd move Trump made was calculated.

That even the stuff that looked strange at the time was part of a detailed blueprint that only he could see.

He was playing three dimensional chess.

The rest of us and especially those of us in the media were still playing checkers.

We just couldn't hope to understand trump's genius.

He was that far ahead of us.

Now beyond the fact that trump won an election that most people, including most people in his political orbit, expected him to lose.

There's always been scant evidence that he was some sort of strategic mastermind, er puppet master who can make anyone particularly republicans dance just the way he wanted.

In fact there was and is ample evidence to the contrary.

Go back to trump's 1987 book The art of the deal and how he describes his typical day.

It goes like this.

Most people are surprised by the way I work.

I play it very loose.

I don't carry a briefcase.

I try not to schedule too many meetings.

I leave my door open.

You can't be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you've got too much structure.

I prefer to come to work Each day and just see what develops Trump has always been this way he's telling us this, he acts and then reacts to the reaction.

He makes, the vast majority of his decisions, not on the available information or even on the guidance of those around him, but by his gut again, Trump was taunting a dictator who has nuclear arms.

For whatever reason, this is not a man who is thinking 10 moves ahead.

This is a man who isn't thinking beyond his first move.

And that is the point.

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