Matt's Reviews > Fear: Trump in the White House

“In 2016, candidate [Donald] Trump gave [journalist] Bob Costa and myself his definition of the job of president: ‘More than anything else, it’s the security of our nation…That’s number one, two, and three… The military, being strong, not letting bad things happen to our country from the outside. And I certainly think that’s always going to be my number-one part of the definition.’ The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world. What follows is that story…”
- Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

In deciding to read and review Bob Woodward’s Fear, I broke two of my personal rules.

The first has to do with time. Specifically, how long it takes for the “news” we ingest each day to become “history.” Typically, a decent number of years – sometimes decades – must pass for us to even approach a full understanding of a momentous historical occasion. This passage allows reason to overtake emotion; gives historians an opportunity to ferret out evidence; and provides the full measure of clarity that comes with hindsight.

That time is clearly missing here.

Covering less than half of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, the stories recounted in Fear are obviously rather fresh in everyone’s mind. More than that, we are still living with the aftershocks of the former president’s tumultuous administration. Memories are still very vivid. Wounds are still very raw. It is hard – bordering on impossible – to guess what this half-decade of bruising campaigns, discarded norms, fractured electorates, and unbridgeable divides will mean in ten or twenty or fifty years. The Republic will probably still be here, but that no longer seems like a given.

***

The second rule has to do with discussing – or even mentioning – politics on the internet. To me, an online political discussion seems about as productive as covering myself in rotting fruit and physically embracing a large nest of murder hornets.

That makes it hard to talk about Fear. It is about politics. More specifically, it is a scathing indictment of the forty-fifth president. Roughly fifty percent will accept everything in the book as a given, the other fifty ignore it as fake news. There is little hope for anything meaningful in bringing it up in the first place. If politics can still ruin family holidays, you can imagine what it does to complete strangers basking in the perceived anonymity of the worldwide web.

Thus, before going any further, I want to emphasize that this review – and my rating – is based on Fear as a work of literature, nothing more.

To that end, Fear is a very average book, bordering on the disappointing.

***

Given that I didn’t much like it, I should begin with the question of how I chose it. The answer: after minimal thought.

There is a massive cottage industry of Trump takedowns. Close your eyes and point your finger. Now open your eyes. You’re pointing at a book about Trump. These run the gamut. Some are serious pieces of journalism. Others are insider tell-alls. Some strive for integrity, others traffic in unsourced gossip.

Honestly, I didn’t expect to ever read a Trump book. I planned to put my head down, ignore them all, and then wait fifty years, by which point I’d be long dead and never have to think about this period again. Of course, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t ignore the world swirling about outside my door. However unlikely, I wanted to try to comprehend what we’d just been through.

I picked Woodward’s book based solely on his reputation. After all, this is the man who – with Carl Bernstein’s help – broke the news that forced a president out of office. The knock on Woodward is that he is part of the establishment, a brand unto himself, prolifically churning out inside-politics bestsellers year after year. It is this establishment-ness, though, that makes Woodward so good. He has the sources. Everyone, it seems, wants to talk to the guy who gave us Deep Throat and All the President’s Men.

It also helps that Woodward’s books are so massively overproduced that if you wait a couple years, you can get a beautifully unread hardcover copy for less than a coffee at Starbucks.

***

Fear begins in 2010, with a brief episode in which Steve Bannon opines that Trump will never run for president. It ends in March 2018, when Trump attorney John Dowd resigns in the midst of the Mueller Investigation. The fact that Woodward covers such a relatively long span in less than 400 pages should let you know just about everything there is about the depth of coverage.

My entire – mostly negative – reaction to Fear can be boiled down to this: it is glib. Woodward’s style reminded me of Frogger, with that desperate frog navigating a hazardous river by jumping from lily pads to logs, all the way to the other side. Instead of lily pads and logs, Woodward skips from one scene to the next, at a pace so frenzied that you barely notice the complete lack of context.

There is nothing resembling a thoughtful narrative here. It is the written equivalent of a clip show, a series of scenes strung together, mostly comprised of allegedly-verbatim dialogue. There is a lot going on in these pages, including tensions with North Korea, Trump’s threats to leave NATO, Trump’s threats to overturn trade agreements, Trump’s fixation on trade deficits (involving his threats to impose tariffs), Trump’s insult to decency after the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, the passage of the tax bill, and the slow-moving cloud of Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Woodward uses each of these vignettes for one purpose: to shock the reader with some jaw-dropping quote either by or about Trump. To be clear, I have no problem believing these things were said, as they have been reported elsewhere. Moreover, the chaotic nature of Trump’s administration is well-corroborated and no longer a secret. The trouble is that – as a reader – I felt like I was getting the highlight reel without any feel for the whole game. Every page seemed like it was designed to be Tweeted. Heck, even though I hadn’t read this before, it was exceedingly familiar, mostly because the juiciest excerpts had already appeared in The Washington Post and other outlets.

One of the many results of this style is an absence of prioritization. For example, with regard to North Korea, Woodward seems to have some real insights into the dangers posed by Kim Jong-un, and the important relationship between the United States and South Korea. Instead of digging into this issue, though, it gets brought up, dropped, and left behind, all so that Woodward can tell us about Trump insulting Jeff Sessions.

***

Missing is any thoughtful analysis. Missing is any sense of how these scenes connected together. Missing is any meaningful portraits of the characters involved. If someone – it won’t be me – actually picks this up in fifty years, they’re not going to have any idea of what’s going on, and not simply because this is the tale of an inherently disordered presidential administration. It’s because Woodward has decided that he doesn’t need to include all that boring old stuff like background, setting, and subject-matter exploration. He knows – or thinks he knows – what his readers want, which is Trump’s chief-of-staff calling him an “idiot.”

***

This is very much a book designed for a specific moment. Published shortly before the 2018 midterm elections, it became an instant bestseller, its highlights – by which I mean lowlights – splashed across the media landscape. If you read it upon release, I am sure that it was suitably horrifying to look behind the curtain.

Now that the curtain has been rolled back, we are left with a book that doesn’t seem to have much heft. It is not poorly written, for Woodward is a polished writer. Indeed, it’s incredibly readable, and I inhaled it the same way my kids inhaled their Halloween candy, with similar results.

It’s just not going to last.

Oftentimes we talk about the “first draft of history,” those volumes that come out in the shadow of big moments, that try to outline what happened, and that give us an initial impression, which can then be amplified, challenged, and changed.

Fear is far too slick to be the first draft of anything. It’s more like the press release for the abstract of the first draft of history. There will be far better titles in the years to come, ones that will obsess less on the insane things that were said, and focus more on the policies those words engendered. This future book will ponder not just what the hell happened, but what it all meant to a country that no longer knows itself, if it ever did.