Labor Day week was a bad one for the Donald Trump administration.
On September 4, the PBS Newshour carried the following story: “Woodward’s White House Book Portrays Officials Trying to Rein in Trump.”
Specifically: Bob Woodward, the two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter and associate editor for The Washington Post, had written a new book about the Trump White House. Its title gave away the contents: Fear: Trump in the White House.
The book will hit bookstores on September 11. But advance copies had clearly been leaked to reviewers.
Among the revelations:
- Former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn believed that Trump would sign a letter canceling a free-trade agreement with South Korea. So he stole the letter from Trump’s desk. Trump “did not notice it was missing.”
- Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described Trump as “a fucking moron.”
- After failing to explain to Trump the importance of American defenses in South Korea, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that Trump “acted like—and had the understanding of—‘a fifth or sixth-grader.'”
- White House Chief of Staff John Kelly privately vented his contempt for Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
- Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow tried to argue to Special Counsel Robert Mueller that Trump could not be asked to give an interview because he is a compulsive liar.
Woodward’s book is the third to attack Trump this year.
In January, Michael Wolff’s scathing volume, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, sent the Trump and his lackeys into a frenzy.
Then, in August, came Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House. Unlike Wolff, Manigault-Newman had been a longtime Trump follower privy to some of his darkest secrets. Now she chose to reveal them.
Trump predictably slandered Woodward: “It’s just another bad book. He’s had a lot of credibility problems.” And: “The book means nothing, it’s a work of fiction … He had the same problem with other presidents.”
Actually, it’s Trump who has a credibility problem—with The Washington Post finding that, by August 1, he had told 4,229 lies since taking office on January 20, 2017.
Bob Woodward
And Trump had undercut himself during a recorded interview with Woodward. On August 14, he called Woodward after hearing reports about the upcoming book.
Woodward said he was sorry that Trump refused to give him an interview for the book, despite his making several requests.
“It’s really too bad, because nobody told me about it,” said Trump. “You know I’m very open to you. I think you’ve always been fair.”
And then, on September 5, Trump was rocked by another scandal: The New York Times published an anonymous Op-Ed essay.
The Op-Ed confirmed much of what reviewers had said appeared in Woodward’s book. And what made it devastating was that the author was identified as “a senior official in the Trump administration.”
The writer called himself a member of “The Resistance.” And he claimed that “many of the senior officials in [Trump’s] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
Among his revelations:
- “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”
- “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”
- “Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.”
- Trump had opposed expelling “so many of Mr. [Vladimir] Putin’s spies” in retaliation for the poisoning of a former Russian spy living in Britain. He also opposed putting further sanctions on Russia “for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better—such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.”
The publishing of the Op-Ed by an anonymous writer touched off a furious guessing game among Washington reporters and ordinary citizens.
Donald Trump
It also triggered a volcanic rage in Trump, who told reporters: “If the failing New York Times has an anonymous anonymous can you believe it, meaning gutless! A gutless editorial.”
Trump labeled the editorial an act of treason—although no State secrets had been revealed, and “leaking” is a routine occurrence among officials at every government agency.
Two days after the editorial appeared, on September 7, Trump told reporters on Air Force One: “Yeah, I would say [Attorney General] Jeff [Sessions] should be investigating who the author of this piece was because I really believe it’s national security,”
Asked if the Justice Department would investigate a case where no national security secrets had been leaked, Sarah Flores, the agency’s spokeswoman, said only: “We do not confirm or deny investigations.”
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TRUMP VS. MACHIAVELLI: TRUMP 0, MACHIAVELLI 10
In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on February 25, 2019 at 11:30 amAfter his untimely assassination, President John F. Kennedy became the subject of a flood of adoring biographies.
Among these:
Many of these appeared shortly after his death. Some—such as A Thousand Days and Kennedy—were massive—totaling 1,087 pages for the first and 758 pages for the second.
John F. Kennedy
Many of these books were written by those who had worked closely with Kennedy and knew his most intimate secrets. Yet the worst of those secrets did not emerge until the early 1970s.
Among those:
Kennedy inspired loyalty by somehow making those around him feel they were valued—and partners in a great historical moment.
By contrast, Donald Trump had held office less than two years when three books highly critical of him emerged.
The first, Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff, appeared in January, 2018. The second, Unhinged, by Omarosa Manigault-Newman, came out in August.
Among the reviews of Fire and Fury:
“What makes the book significant is its sly, hilarious portrait of a hollow man, into the black hole of whose needy, greedy ego the whole world has virtually vanished.”―The Guardian
“An undeniably juicy chronicle of a presidential administration that in just one year has been beset by numerous scandals and crises….” ―The San Francisco Chronicle
Wollf is an author, essayist, journalist, and columnist. He was never a member of Trump’s inner circle—yet he was given extraordinary access to those who worked in the West Wing of the White House.
Donald Trump
Manigault-Newman, on the other hand, had known Trump intimately since 2003, when she first appeared on his NBC “reality” series, The Apprentice. She campaigned for him in 2016 and followed him into the White House as director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison—until she was fired in December, 2017.
After her firing, she abruptly underwent a conversion from worshiper to heretic. As a reviewer on Amazon.com put it:
“It’s a story that starts with a starry eyed younger Omarosa, and ends with her freedom from the ‘TrumpWorld cult’.
“Along the way she becomes increasingly aware that her former mentor, friend, and idol, has no empathy for others, is narcissistic to an extreme, does not read or intake new information unless it’s on a favored cable TV channel, and she also sees signs of dementia-like behavior leaving her wondering what, if anything, she can do as an insider.”
And on September 11th, the most devastating book yet to appear on Trump made its debut: Fear: Trump in the White House.
Its author was Bob Woodward, legendary investigative reporter and Washington Post associate editor.
Woodward “made his bones” as a journalist with Carl Bernstein from 1972 to 1974. Their reporting made “Watergate” a household word—and helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon.
Perhaps the most startling secret to be found within Woodward’s book: Nearly every member of Trump’s handpicked staff considers him an idiot.
In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli raised the question of “whether it is better to be loved than feared, or feared more than loved.”
And he answered it: “The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”
But Machiavelli warned against relying primarily on fear: “Still, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred, for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together.
Niccolo Machiavelli
If Trump ever read Machiavelli, he has ignored this warning with a vengeance.
By repeatedly showing himself ignorant of—and even indifferent to—the realities of Presidential statecraft, Trump quickly forfeited the respect of his top staffers and Cabinet officials.
As a result, Trump has produced a dysfunctional administration constantly teetering on the edge of meltdown.
And by regularly humiliating those staffers and Cabinet officials, he destroyed their ties of loyalty to him as a man and President.
This has produced legions of angry, disillusioned members seeking revenge—and they will eagerly leak Trump’s latest embarrassing secrets to the first reporter who comes asking.
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