Donald Trump’s dystopian universe
What would it take at this point, amid the crush of books about the Trump White House — after the Mueller report and an impeachment trial and now the coronavirus pandemic — for a revelation about the president to be truly surprising? Would it be to learn that he hates money and harbours dreams of retiring to an ascetic, monk-like existence? That he loves to read and is intimately familiar with the works of Elena Ferrante? Readers who pick up Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, and are tantalised by the promise on its dust jacket of “an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind,” will quickly get schooled in a lesson that apartment hunters in New York often have to learn: A window can be only so vivid if it looks out onto an air shaft.
Yes, Donald Trump explicitly told Mr Woodward back in March that in public he was deliberately understating (or, to put it more bluntly, lying about) what he had learned about the pandemic: That the coronavirus was, as he told Mr Woodward the month before, “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” but he preferred “to always play it down.” Yet the discrepancy between what Mr Trump knew (the virus was bad) and what he said (it’s all good) was already reported in April. Mr Trump had loudly refused to let American passengers disembark from a cruise ship in March “because I like the numbers being where they are.”
The Mr Trump that emerges in Rage is impetuous and self-aggrandising — in other words, immediately recognisable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention. Mr Woodward reminds us at several points that he diligently conducted 17 on-the-record interviews with the president. “In one case,” he explains, for anyone fascinated by his methodology, “I took handwritten notes and the other 16 were recorded with his permission.” The interviews took place over a sevenmonth period from December 2019 to July 2020. After his first book on Trump, Fear, was published two years ago, Mr Woodward says, he started this follow-up intending “to look again and more deeply at the national security team he recruited and built in the first months after his election in 2016.”
One half of Rage reads like that original project, a typical Woodwardian narrative of very serious men soberly doing their duty, trying their darnedest to keep the president focused and on message. He is predictably coy about his sources, saying only that he drew from “hundreds of hours of interviews with first-hand participants and witnesses to these events,” nearly all of whom spoke to him on “deep background.”
Still, it’s not hard to guess who some of the principal sources might be based on how closely the book seems to hew to their preferred versions of events. Mr Woodward deems them “all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country,” singling them out in his epilogue for their impeccable intentions. “Imperfect men who answered the call to public service.”
So far, so tedious. Enter Mr Trump, who in his first interview with Mr Woodward dropped hints about a “secret new weapons system,” and confirmed what Mr Woodward calls a “hard question” about the United States coming “really close to war with North Korea.” Mr Woodward makes much ado about obtaining 25 previously unreported letters between Mr Trump and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, relating the contents of a number of them in minute detail. But even he seems hard-pressed to explain their lasting significance. Despite all this, North Korea continues to develop “both nuclear and conventional weapons.”
For the most part, Mr Trump turned the 17 interviews into opportunities for his rambling monologues, using Mr Woodward as an audience, inevitably steering the conversations back to his favorite talking points: “fake news,” James Comey, the Mueller report. In April, as the pandemic raged, Mr Woodward went to the president with a prepared “list of 14 critical areas where my sources said major action was needed” to stop the mass death; what’s puzzling isn’t so much Mr Trump’s refusal to engage with this earnest list as Woodward’s expectation that he would. “We were speaking past each other,” a plaintive Mr Woodward writes, “almost from different universes.”
The universe where Mr Woodward thinks he can ask a president windy, high-minded questions like “What are your priorities?” and “What’s in your heart?” in the hopes that he’ll get some profound material for his book.
It’s also a universe where Mr Woodward can un-self-consciously regurgitate the theory, peddled by the China hawks in the administration, that “China had a sinister goal” and purposefully allowed the coronavirus to turn into a global pandemic.
Mr Woodward ends Rage by delivering his grave verdict. “When his performance as president is taken in its entirety,” he intones, “I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.” It’s an anticlimactic declaration that could surprise no one other than maybe Bob Woodward. What if the real story about the Trump era is less about Mr Trump and more about the people who surround and protect him, standing by him in public even as they denounce him (or talk to Mr Woodward) in private — a tale not of character but of complicity?