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475 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2020
[According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump. Now, I think we have the inverse. I think 80 percent of the people working for him think he’s saving the world, and 20 percent—maybe less now—think they’re saving the world from Trump.”--------------------------------------
Let that analysis sink in. Twenty percent of the president’s staff think they are “saving the world” from the president.
Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”Bob Woodward has been reporting on American presidents for a long time. He and Carl Bernstein, reporters at The Washington Post, broke into public consciousness with their coverage of the Watergate scandal back in the early 1970s, culminating with their book, All the Presidents Men, one of the great political books of all time. In the intervening years Bob Woodward has continued covering politics in DC. He still holds the title of Associate Editor at the Post, but his production these days tends toward the long form. He has written 19 books since that first one.
“I call him the night prowler. I think it’s true. He doesn’t drink. He has this kind of savage energy and it comes through in some of the recordings I’ve released. It comes through in his rallies. So for me, it’s a window into his mind. It’s much like, as somebody said, the Nixon tapes where you see what he’s actually thinking and doing.” - from the Guardian interviewHe also had access to a vast range of official documents, and spoke with many others in the administration. While those conversations were conducted as “deep background,” it is pretty clear who made themselves available. Primary among these are Dan Coats, the erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, James Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Rex Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, even Jared Kushner, still the son-in-law. One can expect that they all want to portray themselves in the best possible light. I rolled my eyes a lot, particularly, when Jared was handed the mike. Woodward concentrates on their interactions with Trump, leaving aside many other issues relevant for each.
“No,” Trump said. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you,” he said, his voice mocking and incredulous. “Wow, I don’t feel that at all.”The establishment of the Mueller Investigation in May 2017 was hailed as a triumph of institutional integrity over venal self-dealing. Turns out, not so much, despite the holy aura vested in the probe by the mainstream media. In fact, it was a dodge. There was a real investigation that had begun in the FBI, led by Andrew McCabe, a die-hard Republican, looking into the connections between Trump, his campaign, and Vladimir Putin. McCabe was seen as being too straight a shooter to be trusted with this, so establishing the probe was a way to push him to the side.
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 28, 2018, Republican representative from Florida Ron DeSantis…remarked to [Rod] Rosenstein, “They talk about the Mueller investigation—it’s really the Rosenstein investigation. You appointed Mueller. You’re supervising Mueller.”And Rosenstein made sure, by establishing a rigid chain of command, that McCabe would be kept well out of the loop.
”Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. This was his core understanding of communications strategy in the age of the internet and Trump.And Trump is certainly a genius (however unstable) at creating and sustaining controversy. Michael Cohen, in his book Disloyal, makes the related point that Trump has always had a genius for manipulating the media.
I told him people I talked to were saying the presidential race between him and Biden was now a coin toss.another
“You know, maybe,” he said. “and maybe not.”
That sounded like a good description of a coin toss.
“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”Woodward is indeed a master at getting people to talk, not that Donald Trump needs much prompting, particularly when the subject matter is his personal favorite. But Woodward demonstrates impressive patience and perseverance in coping with an interviewee who seemed to have the attention span of a goldfish. This talent is one that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appreciated, in an interview with Mike Allen for Politico.
That might not be difficult, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.
"I think he's obviously a very astute journalist," Gates said to POLITICO's Mike Allen…"I would have really liked to recruit him for the CIA because he has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill [their] guts to him, on background, nothing there for the historians, but his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn't be talking about is extraordinary and maybe unique." - from the Politico articleDonald Trump is an angry person. Always aggrieved, always looking to blame others for his failures, hurling invective and employing demagoguery to rouse an unanalytical base to support rank foolishness. Woodward opens the book with a couple of quotes by Trump about his capacity for inducing rage in people. It is certainly something at which he excels. But he remains clueless about how that works, which is no surprise, as Trump is clearly one of the least self-aware leaders we have ever had, hell, maybe one of the least self-aware people of his time. Here in November, 2020, as Trump does all he can to poison the democracy that elected him in 2016, as he does all he can to sow chaos in America’s foreign policy, as he does everything he can to seek revenge on government employees he deems insufficiently loyal, as he lies at an automatic firing rate that is impressive even for him, it is clear that along with disgust, the proper response to Trump is the one Woodward focuses on here. Rage will leave you more informed than you were before, but it will also leave you seething. If it does not, you are part of the problem.
We were speaking past each other, almost from different universes.
“I’ve talked to lots of your predecessors,” [Woodward] said. “I never talked to Nixon, but I talked to many, many of them. They get philosophical when I ask the question, what have you learned about yourself? And that’s the question on you: What have you learned about yourself?”
Trump sighed audibly. “I can handle more than other people can handle. Because, and I’ll tell you what, whether I learned about it myself—more people come up to me and say—and I mean very strong people, people that are successful, even. A lot of people. They say, I swear to you, I don’t know how it’s possible for you to handle what you handle. How you’ve done this, with the kind of opposition, the kind of shenanigans, the kind of illegal witch hunts.”
In the words of Martin Luther King: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."