“Fear: Trump in the White House,” by Bob Woodward (Simon and Schuster).
Woodward saves the best to last when he has Donald Trump’s attorney John Dowd unable to tell his client: “You’re a fucking liar.”
No surprise here. Neither is there anything shockingly new in his depiction of total chaos and endless duplicity and doublespeak in the Trump Whitehouse.
His source notes show Woodward has drawn heavily from reports published in the New York Times and his old Washington Post.
He pointedly describes officials hiding documents from their attention-deficient boss to prevent him taking damaging and ill-considered action. Woodward says this amounts to nothing short of an administrative coup d’tat.
I have not dipped into nes extensive bibliography since “The Last of the President’s Men” and my journalistic knowledge is the poorer for it.
As a lecturer I recommended “All The President’s Men” as a how-to text book on good journalism.
“Fear” re-justifies that endorsement.
Exhaustive research. Checking and double checking facts. Getting behind the spin and the officialese.There is no substitute for these.
I would have liked to have read more about the complicity of those using an intellectually challenged, malicious and venal man for their own political ends.
I would also have liked some answers as to why people voted for him. Do they simply share his hate and bigotry? Were they simply taken in by by the braggadocio of a six-times business loser? Where they so angered by the intelligencia talking down to them that they made a petulant call to put at the helm a computer illiterate man intellectually capable of at best teenage logic and prepared to go to ay length to retain the job he’s reminded he has not the wherewithal to do?
There’s no indication of what next. Will Trump serve out his full term? The mid-term elections that occurred whilst I was reading this would suggest he does survive.
But what of re-election?
Perhaps that is the subject of Woodward’s next book.