The following article by Gabriel Pogrund was posted on the Washington Post website September 4, 2018:
President Trump and Bob Woodward discuss Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” before its publication. (The Washington Post)
Southern Republican senators defended Jeff Sessions after an explosive new book by Bob Woodward recounted how President Trump called his attorney general a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent.
In the forthcoming chronicle of Trump’s White House, “Fear,” Woodward writes that the president privately called Sessions a “traitor,” saying: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”
The remarks are said to have come during a conversation between Trump and his former staff secretary, Rob Porter, about Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation. They represent the most withering insults the president has directed at his attorney general in months of largely one-sided sniping.