Washington, United States | AFP | Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Then-president Donald Trump secretly sent Covid test kits to Vladimir Putin despite a US shortage during the pandemic, and spoke multiple times with the Russian leader after leaving office, says an explosive new book by Bob Woodward.

The upcoming opus, "War," also chronicles some of President Joe Biden's own acknowledged missteps and his struggle to prevent escalation of conflict in the Middle East, including exasperation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over futile efforts to get Israel and Hamas to reach a cease-fire.

In excerpts published Tuesday by The Washington Post, where he is an associate editor, Woodward lays out damning details and actions by Trump, who the writer says has retained a personal relationship with Putin even as Trump campaigns for another presidential term and the Russian president conducts a war against Ukraine, a US ally.

With the coronavirus ravaging the world in 2020, Trump sent a batch of test kits to his counterpart in Moscow. Putin accepted the supplies but sought to avoid political fallout for Trump, urging that he not reveal the dispatch of medical equipment, this books says.

According to Woodward, Putin told Trump: "I don't want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me."

Woodward also cites an unnamed Trump aide in the book who indicated the Republican flagbearer may have spoken to Putin up to seven times since leaving the White House in 2021. 

The Post, reporting Woodward's account, said that at one point in early 2024, Trump ordered an aide out of his office in his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida so he could hold a private call with Putin.

"War" is set for publication on October 15, just three weeks before a critical US election in which Trump is locked in a tight race against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

While Harris does make appearances in the book, she is seen in a supporting role to Biden "and hardly determining foreign policy herself," the Post reported.

Woodward has chronicled American presidencies for 50 years, and this is his fourth book since Trump's upset victory in 2016. He began his presidential reportages with Richard Nixon, who was undone by the 1970s Watergate scandal exposed by Woodward and Post colleague Carl Bernstein.

Woodward concluded that Trump's interactions, detailed in the book, with an authoritarian president at war with a US ally make him more unfit to be president than Nixon.

"Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024," Woodward writes.

The Trump campaign blasted the book as "trash" and "made up stories."

They are "the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome," campaign communications director Steven Cheung told AFP.

According to CNN, which obtained a pre-release book copy, Woodward repeatedly quotes Biden dropping F bombs as he discusses his personal and political challenges.

Biden called Putin "the epitome of evil," blasted Netanyahu as a "liar" and said he "should never have picked" Merrick Garland as US attorney general.

According to the book, during an April phone call Biden turned testy with Netanyahu.

"What's your strategy, man?" Biden asked the Israeli leader, according to Woodward. 

"We have to go into Rafah," Netanyahu said, referring to a city in southern Gaza.

"Bibi, you've got no strategy," Biden responded.