![]() Tillerson, who had agreed to join the administration after multiple luminaries told him “you must do it,” lasted only fourteen months as America’s top diplomat. The earliest and most compelling chapters of Rage make for depressingly painful reading, for they detail all too richly the horrifically insulting treatment that the deeply insecure new president dished out to Tillerson, Mattis, and Coats, as well as to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former Alabama Senator who had been Trump’s first prominent political supporter and who gave up his Senate seat to head up the Department of Justice. I believe it will humble him.” It did not take long for that hope to be extinguished. None of these officials were oblivious to the dangers of working under Donald Trump, for as Woodward writes, in New York the new chief executive “had built a decades-long reputation for disparaging former business and romantic partners.” Yet Dan Coats’ wife Marsha voiced the wishful optimism of many, saying that “I truly believe the office will change Donald Trump. Thus, the new president began his first term with some undeniably first-rate top appointees, such as Defence Secretary James Mattis, a widely respected former Marine general, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the retiring CEO of energy giant Mobil Exxon, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a deeply principled former Indiana Republican Senator. presidents awaited inauguration in January 2017, however, many alumni of previous Republican administrations privately advised colleagues that the nation’s best interests required that the utterly unprepared Trump deserved the best cabinet members he could be persuaded to appoint. That history of humiliating social inferiority is essential for appreciating the anger and rage that candidate Trump offered to disaffected American voters in 2016, especially those in the “flyover” states lying between the elite east and west coasts. ![]() Trump’s inability to articulate substantive trains of thought renders Woodward’s narrative utterly deadening ![]() In the 1980s, the mutual loathing between Trump and the city’s intellectual elites was captured by the satirical magazine Spy, which irreverently branded Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” Trump hailed from Queens, an outer borough comparable to say Hounslow or Croydon, and Manhattan sophisticates spoke of such ausländers as “B & T,” for the bridges or tunnels they had to traverse in order to visit the city’s more august precincts. Long before Trump became nationally known as a reality television performer, he had a long and chequered career as a New York-area real estate developer. Trump would rue his decision not to speak with Woodward for that volume, and thus the centrepiece of Rage, Woodward’s new pre-election book on Trump, is word-for-word narration of eighteen conversations between Woodward and the president, dating from 5 December 2019 until 21 July 2020. Two years ago, Woodward published Fear: Trump in the White House, an unsurprisingly devastating portrait of a president who had never imagined he would win election and who had no idea whatsoever about how to do the job. For example, even in early 2017 Woodward had no hesitation in publicly branding the former UK spook Christopher Steele’s “dossier” of defamatory third-hand tales about President-elect Trump “a garbage document.” Rage by Bob Woodward – Simon & Schuster UK (2020), £12. In a time when most American journalists have forsaken professionalism for overt political partisanship, Woodward, now aged 77, is an admirable dinosaur from another era. Woodward’s signature technique is the “deep background” interview, where high-ranking officials share their thoughts with him, knowing that while he will quote them verbatim, he will never explicitly name them as a source, allowing everyone a chimera of deniability. ![]() Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, but also much-lauded volumes on subjects as varied as the US Supreme Court, comedian John Belushi, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Over the intervening years Woodward has authored or co-authored now twenty books, many on the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Forty-eight years ago, he was one of two Washington Post reporters who broke open the “Watergate” scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation from office. “Bob” Woodward has an unparalleled reputation as America’s top journalist.
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