Fear

FEAR: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE
By Bob Woodward

It’s a testament to the power of his name that the publication of Bob Woodward’s Fear had such an immediate impact. Though it dominated a week of news, Woodward’s reporting uncovered nothing surprising or new, or added any nuance to what we already know of Donald Trump.

That’s not to say Fear is a bad book, or not worth reading. The dysfunction it describes in the White House is both important to have a record of and entertaining in its own right. But when it came out it was heralded as somehow carrying more weight than similar accounts such as Michael Woolf’s Fire and Fury and Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, which were both dismissed in official quarters as being sensational or gossipy. Both Woolf and Newman, however, had their own sources, and the story they told is one very much on all fours with Woodward’s. I suspect the Trump White House is just a sleazy, tabloid sort of environment. Serious reporting and journalistic standards can’t do anything to clean it up.

So, just to recap what by now is an overwhelming pile of evidence (much of it provided by the president himself): Donald Trump is a boastful narcissist and a bully with an extremely primitive world view that sees everyone as either strong or weak, a winner or a loser. Being strong, or a winner, is the only thing that matters. Or at least being perceived as strong, which comes to the same thing since perception is reality. While he may or may not be a total moron, it’s clear that Trump knows absolutely nothing about how government works, foreign affairs, or how the economy functions (what may be the funniest anecdote in the book has Trump suggest the government simply print money to pay off the nation’s debt). What’s more, Trump isn’t interested in finding out about any of these things. He can’t process information that contradicts his own views, immediately dismissing contrary opinions as bullshit. “I know I’m right,” he would tell advisors warning him of his actions on tariffs. “If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.”

His inner court can best be described as sycophants and handlers. Trump brooks no contradiction, but is very susceptible to flattery and luckily has no attention span (which means that bad decisions can be delayed, sometimes only for a matter of hours, until he has forgotten about them entirely). In perhaps the book’s biggest revelation, his own lawyers have to convince him not to be questioned by the Mueller inquiry because he’s a “fucking liar.” So much so that he can’t stop himself.

Again, this is something we knew already from his various Tweets and speeches. Still, Woodward’s dramatization of just how deep the rot goes has value. We need to feel shocked by all this, so that, perhaps, we won’t come to see it as normal.

There is one point, however, where Woodward steps way out of line. This comes in his account of James Comey’s briefing of the president on the matter of the Steele dossier, where, almost as an afterthought, Comey mentioned the business of the golden showers in a Moscow hotel room. Woodward thinks he shouldn’t have said anything about this because it somehow cheapened or polluted the rest of his presentation about Russia’s election interference. I don’t see why it would have. Comey thought it made “complete sense” since it was part of the dossier and Trump was going to hear about it anyway.

Woodward can’t get his head around this, and bizarrely tries to compare what Comey did to his own writing of a story for the Washington Post, which is a completely different kettle of fish.

In any event, climbing on to his high horse and telling the reader that he would never have done what Comey did is both irrelevant and something no historian or journalist should do. One suspects Woodward is engaging in a bit of damage control of his own here, since he later declared the Steele dossier to be a “garbage document.” Since he had no way of knowing if the contents of the document were true this was an astounding claim, and one quickly held up by Trump as exculpatory. “I was not delighted to appear to have taken sides,” Woodward writes. But he did.

One benefit of this, however, is to make Fear seem less partisan. While damning, this is far from being a hatchet job on the Trump presidency. Matters like his problems with porn stars and the ongoing Russian investigation are barely touched on at all. Instead there is only the spectacle of a vulgar buffoon surrounded by the usual circle of courtiers going through a daily series of empty rituals. Where will this end? With more books, of course. It’s one sure way of making money out of a train wreck.

Notes:
Review first published online September 25, 2018. The meaning of the title is obscure, at least to me. It seems to have been drawn from a (typically) vague utterance of Trump’s where he says that “real power is . . . fear.” I take it this is related to the idea that it is better to be feared than to be loved. However, in context, the line has to do with fighting back against accusations of wrongdoing coming from women, where it seems as though his fear is what is driving Trump’s own need to appear to be strong. That’s more like paranoia than power.