The President in his crazytown

When Steve Bannon met Donald Trump in 2010 to discuss the latter’s plan to run for President in 2012 on the Republican ticket, he was little taken aback by the future President’s lack of knowledge even on the most rudimentary business of politics. Bannon and David Bossie, a House Republican and conservative activist, were giving a quick coaching to Trump on the Presidential race. Trump was clueless on the pro-life stand. He didn’t know there’s a record of his contributions, and he lied on his voting record. Finally, when Bannon told Trump that he should be the Tea Party candidate, against the ‘rigged system’ and elites, and hold up populism for the common man, the property mogul was amazed. “I love that. That’s what I am, a popularist,” he said. “No, no,” Bannon said, “It’s populist.” “Yeah, a popularist,” Trump insisted.

This is the Donald Trump journalist Bob Woodward portrays in Fear: Trump in the White House , his latest book — ignorant, uninterested, unpredictable and chaotic. The 420-page book is full of anecdotes like this, written in a lucid, matter-of-fact way — typical of Woodward — that reconstruct the decision-making or the lack of it within the administration and the struggle among the staff to rein in the President.

Woodward’s Trump is driven largely by his own ideological predilections and unpredictable instincts rather than the national security concerns of the establishment. Gary Cohn, the former economic adviser in the White House, once had to steal a one-page draft letter from Trump addressed to his South Korean counterpart, terminating the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Worse, “in the anarchy and disorder of the White House, and Trump’s mind, the President never noticed the missing letter,” writes Woodward.

On another occasion, John M Dowd, a former personal attorney of Trump, was prepping the President for an interview with Robert Mueller, the special counsel who’s investigating the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Dowd never thought the President was capable of such an interview. But Trump insisted. After facing mock questions for a while, Trump became angry. “This thing is a goddamn hoax... I really don’t want to testify,” he said.

According to Woodward’s account, the lack of trust between President Trump and his staff is appalling. John F Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, called the President “an idiot” in a meeting. “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown,” Kelly is quoted as saying.

In the words of Reince Priebus, Kelly’s predecessor, the President’s bedroom, where he goes to tweet, is the “the devil’s workshop” and early mornings and Sunday evenings, when Trump unleashes himself on Twitter, is “the witching hour”. After a National Security Council meeting in which Trump questioned the massive US military presence in South Korea, Jim Mattis, the Defence Secretary, “was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the President acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’” Fear portrays a President who lacks any real control over his government staff. “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens,” Priebus is quoted as saying in the book about the administration’s decision-making. Woodward describes the state of affairs as “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world”.

Insulting staff members

President Trump also doesn’t mince words when it comes to attacking or insulting his staff members. During the campaign, he told Paul Manafort, the former campaign chief, that he was terrible on TV. “You have got no energy. You don’t represent the campaign.” The President said about Priebus: “He’s like a little rat. He just scurries around.”

He called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner” who “couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.” According to Trump, the former National Security Adviser, HR McMaster, dresses in cheap suits, “like a beer salesman”. And he once told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that he didn’t trust him. “I don’t want you doing any more negotiations… You’re past your prime.”

Fear hardly offers any insights into policy-making or even strategic thinking of the administration. Rather, the central idea of the book is the dysfunctionality of the Trump House, which itself is not new. There were several books already written on the Trump White House and hundreds of news reports on the President’s unpredictable behaviour. But unlike Fire and Fury , Michael Wolf’s tell-all book on the Trump presidency which created a storm in recent past, Woodward, the journalist who brought down President Richard Nixon by exposing the Watergate scandal in The Washington Post , hasn’t dramatised the actual happenings in the White House.

He has reconstructed the President’s crazytown based on “hundreds of hours of interviews with first-hand participants and witnesses that were conducted on deep background”. He hasn’t revealed who provided the information. But the damning revelations in the book speak for themselves. The title comes from a 2016 interview of Trump with Woodward and his colleague Robert Costa. “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, Fear,” Trump said then.

Almost two years into his presidency, fear and anarchy define the Trump White House. The President is preoccupied with, if not scared of, the Mueller investigation. His authority within the government is so weak that one of his staff members recently wrote an anonymous Oped in The New York Times , challenging the way he runs the government. And Trump appears to be clueless on how to fix things. Amid the ruins, what remains is only sound and fury.

Bob Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where he has worked for 47 years. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for the Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and second in 2003 as the lead reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

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