The longterm Washington Post investigative reporter who has uncovered or covered the shenanigans of seven presidents tackles the reign of Donald Trump for the second time in this exhaustive documentary based on seventeen interviews with the president and a lot of inside-the belt information gleaned from his many other sources. If there are any rational human beings who still believe almost anything that Donald Trump ever said, reading this work should set them straight. The fact that Trump agreed to the interviews at all, in spite of Woodward’s negative portrayal of him in his earlier book Fear, is a testament to his delusional egotistic hubris.
The extensively verbatim transcriptions of the conversations reveal fragmented, diversionary, self-congratulatory paranoid non-answers to questions, laced with lies and superlatives applied to himself and invective applied to almost everyone else. Non-sequiturs abound and at times the answers reminded me of the neologistic jargon of a stroke patient with damage to speech areas of the brain.
The inner workings and chaos of the Trump White House are described in far more detail than anyone other than a dedicated political junkee would ever enjoy or need to get the central message. The labyrinth of acronyms especially in the senior cabinet level personnel and the military is confusing. The quoted exchanges of insincere, mutually flattering love letters between Trump and Kim Yong Un of North Korea would be laughable if the world’s peace did not depend on their interaction. As it is, they are just nauseating.
It is striking that only three of the twenty eight people whose photos appear in the book are women, all in rather minor roles in the background.
Woodward, perhaps because of his longstanding Washington insider status with almost unlimited contacts to the rich and powerful (the president always returned his phone calls) seems a bit restrained in his criticism, but comes across as also arrogant and self-important, deeming it appropriate for an unelected reporter to advise the president on both domestic and foreign affairs.
This is far more documentation than any reader should need to conclude that Donald Trump was and still is a dangerous force in the world. Unfortunately, the people who should read this book are the least likely to do so.
The Passionate Reader 