Woodward’s ‘Fear’ puts White House on defense

Trump called ‘idiot’ as book depicts chaos

WASHINGTON — An incendiary book by a reporter who helped bring down President Richard Nixon is roiling the White House, as current and former aides of President Donald Trump are quoted calling him an “idiot” and claiming they removed papers from his desk to prevent him from withdrawing from a pair of trade agreements.

The book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward is the latest to throw the Trump administration into damage-control mode with explosive anecdotes about the commander in chief. The Associated Press obtained a copy of “Fear: Trump in the White House” on Tuesday, a week before its official release.

Trump pushed back in an interview with The Daily Caller, saying: “It’s just another bad book.”

The president denied accounts in the book that senior aides snatched sensitive documents off his desk to keep him from making impulsive deci-

sions. He said, “There was nobody taking anything from me.”

Current and former White House officials estimate that nearly all their colleagues cooperated with the famed Watergate journalist. The White House, in a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, dismissed the book as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad.”

The book quotes chief of staff John Kelly as having doubts about Trump’s mental faculties, declaring during one meeting, “We’re in Crazytown.” It also says he called Trump an “idiot,” an account Kelly denied Tuesday.

The book says Trump’s former lawyer in the Russia probe, John Dowd, doubted the president’s ability to avoid perjuring himself should he be interviewed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and potential coordination with Trump’s campaign. Dowd, who stepped down in January, resigned after the mock interview, the book says.

“Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit,” Dowd is quoted telling the president.

Dowd, in a statement Tuesday, said “no so-called ‘practice session’ or ‘re-enactment’ ” took place.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is quoted explaining to Trump why the U.S. maintains troops on the Korean Peninsula to monitor North Korea’s missile activities. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Mattis said, according to the book.

The book recounts that Mattis told “close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixthgrader.’ ” Mattis said in a statement: “The contemptuous words about the President attributed to me in Woodward’s book were never uttered by me or in my presence.”

Woodward reported that after Syria’s Bashar Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted the Syrian leader taken out, saying, “Kill him! Let’s go in.” Mattis assured Trump he would get right on it but then told a senior aide they’d do nothing of the kind, Woodward wrote.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley denied Tuesday that Trump had ever planned to assassinate Assad. She said people should take what is written in books about the president with “a grain of salt.”

The book quotes Trump as mocking his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who has been a target of the president’s wrath.

“This guy is mentally retarded,” Trump said of Sessions, according to the book. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”