(NYT is not exactly wowed.)
NY Times, Sept. 16, 2020
In Bob Woodward’s ‘Rage,’ a Reporter and a President From Different
Universes
By Jennifer Szalai
Rage
By Bob Woodward
Illustrated. 452 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30.
What would it take at this point, amid the crush of books about the
Trump White House — after the Mueller report and an impeachment trial
and now the coronavirus pandemic — for a revelation about the president
to be truly surprising? Would it be to learn that he hates money and
harbors dreams of retiring to an ascetic, monk-like existence? That he
loves to read and is intimately familiar with the works of Elena
Ferrante? Readers who pick up Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” and are
tantalized by the promise on its dust jacket of “an utterly vivid window
into Trump’s mind,” will quickly get schooled in a lesson that apartment
hunters in New York often have to learn: A window can be only so vivid
if it looks out onto an air shaft.
Yes, Trump explicitly told Woodward back in March that in public he was
deliberately understating (or, to put it more bluntly, lying about) what
he had learned about the pandemic: that the coronavirus was, as he told
Woodward the month before, “more deadly than even your strenuous flus”
but he preferred “to always play it down.” Yet the discrepancy between
what Trump knew (the virus was bad) and what he said (it’s all good) was
already reported in April. Trump had loudly refused to let American
passengers disembark from a cruise ship in March “because I like the
numbers being where they are.”
The Trump that emerges in “Rage” is impetuous and self-aggrandizing — in
other words, immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal
amount of attention. Woodward reminds us at several points that he
diligently conducted 17 on-the-record interviews with the president. “In
one case,” Woodward explains, for anyone fascinated by his methodology,
“I took handwritten notes and the other 16 were recorded with his
permission.” The interviews took place over a seven-month period from
December 2019 to July 2020. After his first book on Trump, “Fear,” was
published two years ago, Woodward says, he started this follow-up
intending “to look again and more deeply at the national security team
he recruited and built in the first months after his election in 2016.”
One half of “Rage” reads like that original project, a typical
Woodwardian narrative of very serious men soberly doing their duty,
trying their darnedest to keep the president focused and on message.
Woodward is predictably coy about his sources, saying only that he drew
from “hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants and
witnesses to these events,” nearly all of whom spoke to him on “deep
background.”
Still, it’s not hard to guess who some of the principal sources might be
based on how closely the book seems to hew to their preferred versions
of events. The former defense secretary Jim Mattis has “a stoic Marine
exterior and attention-getting ramrod posture, but his bright, open and
inviting smile softened his presence.” The former director of national
intelligence Dan Coats is “soft on the outside but with a spine of steel
on the inside.” (A sign of someone’s unassailable decency to Woodward
seems to be this combination of hard and soft.) Along with former
secretary of state Rex Tillerson (“a Texan with a smooth voice and an
easy laugh”), Woodward deems them “all conservatives or apolitical
people who wanted to help him and the country,” singling them out in his
epilogue for their impeccable intentions. “Imperfect men who answered
the call to public service.”
So far, so tedious. Enter Trump, who in his first interview with
Woodward dropped hints about a “secret new weapons system,” and
confirmed what Woodward calls a “hard question” about the United States
coming “really close to war with North Korea.” Woodward makes much ado
about obtaining 25 previously unreported letters between Trump and the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, relating the contents of a number of
them in minute detail. But even he seems hard-pressed to explain their
lasting significance, strenuously depicting them as “declarations of
personal fealty that might be uttered by the Knights of the Round
Table.” Despite all this, North Korea continues to develop “both nuclear
and conventional weapons.”
For the most part, Trump turned the 17 interviews into opportunities for
his rambling monologues, using Woodward as an audience, inevitably
steering the conversations back to his favorite talking points: “fake
news,” James Comey, the Mueller report. Woodward tried to get Trump to
talk about policy and governing — “This is all for the serious history,
Mr. President,” he coaxed — but Trump would have none of it. In April,
as the pandemic raged, Woodward went to Trump with a prepared “list of
14 critical areas where my sources said major action was needed” to stop
the mass death; what’s puzzling isn’t so much Trump’s refusal to engage
with this earnest list as Woodward’s expectation that he would. “We were
speaking past each other,” a plaintive Woodward writes, “almost from
different universes.”
The universe that Woodward comes from is where the old-school
establishment is still venerated, and where Woodward thinks he can ask a
president windy, high-minded questions like “What are your priorities?”
and “What’s in your heart?” in the hopes that he’ll get some profound
material for his book.
It’s also a universe where Woodward can un-self-consciously regurgitate
the theory, peddled by the China hawks in the administration, that
“China had a sinister goal” and purposefully allowed the coronavirus to
turn into a global pandemic. “If they engineered this and intentionally
let it out into the world —” Woodward begins saying to Trump, in what
reads like an inadvertently comic scene in which Trump is so
undisciplined that he can’t even take the bait.
Woodward ends “Rage” by delivering his grave verdict. “When his
performance as president is taken in its entirety,” he intones, “I can
only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.” It’s an
anticlimactic declaration that could surprise no one other than maybe
Bob Woodward. In “The Choice,” his book about the 1996 presidential
campaign, he explained something that still seems a core belief of his:
“When all is said and sifted, character is what matters most.” But if
the roiling and ultimately empty palace intrigues documented in “Rage”
and “Fear” are any indications, this lofty view comes up woefully short.
What if the real story about the Trump era is less about Trump and more
about the people who surround and protect him, standing by him in public
even as they denounce him (or talk to Woodward) in private — a tale not
of character but of complicity?
Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.
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