‘Fear’ paints a portrait of chaos
quite bring himself to tell the president that his tweets, his boasts, his cries of “Fake News,” left little doubt that he was a “[expletive] liar.”
Mr. Trump’s inner circle, Mr. Priebus pointed out, was composed of people — daughter Ivanka, son-in-law Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway and Mr. Bannon — who had little or no experience in government. Worse, they were “natural predators.”
“When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls,” Mr. Priebus added, “things start getting nasty and bloody.”
The adults in the room — Secretary of Defense James Mattis, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and Mr. Porter — Mr. Woodward reveals, felt compelled to take steps to thwart the president’s volatile and dangerous impulses.
Mr. Cohn removed from the president’s desk a letter announcing the withdrawal of the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Mr. Mattis ignored Mr. Trump’s order to assassinate Syrian president Bashar Assad, Mr. Porter “slow walked” Mr. Trump’s proposed executive orders on tariffs, NAFTA and NATO, relying on the president’s stunningly short attention span to derail them.
“Fear” is not without flaws. Mr. Woodward relies too heavily on the judgment of people, like Mr. Cohn and Mr. Porter, who granted him access. He does not supply the context, to cite two examples, for the Trump Tower meeting and Mr. Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
He does not discuss ethics scandals, Mr. Trump’s assaults on the media and his intelligence agencies and political opponents. He lets stand (without introducing contrary views) his own comment to “Fox News Sunday” that the Steele dossier was a “garbage document” and Mr. Dowd’s claim that Robert Mueller has no case for collusion or obstruction of justice.
That said, the publication of “Fear” and, in the same week, the anonymous letter in The New York Times by a senior official in the administration, make it even more difficult to deny that the Trump administration is chaotic — and our president is self-absorbed, uninformed and impulsive.