Meltdown in C\RAZYTOWN
Random assassination demands. Watching golf instead of fighting terror. An 11-year-old’s grasp of world affairs. A bombshell new book by the man who brought down Nixon claims to lay bare the surreal truth about Trump’s presidency
WHEN his homeland security adviser requested a chat about the pressing threat from cyberterrorism, Donald Trump complained he was too busy watching the golf on TV.
He wasn’t too busy, however, to jot down his great thoughts for a forthcoming speech. ‘TRADe Is BAD,’ he wrote.
Meanwhile, in the Oval Office — which should be the calm heart of the most powerful administration on earth — chaos reigned, with two senior aides so desperate to save the U.s. from terrible political decisions that they even stole papers from the president’s desk so they couldn’t be signed, rightly predicting he would simply forget them.
The best bedroom farce writer couldn’t have dreamed up the revelations about Donald Trump’s presidency in an excoriating new book by the veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward — famously one half of the team which helped expose the Watergate scandal that ended the Richard Nixon presidency.
Forty-six years later, according to Woodward, a new generation of ‘president’s men’ are said to be involved in another desperate cover-up, this time to paper over the personal failings of — and the threat to national security from — an unhinged leader whose grasp of foreign affairs compares to that of an 11-year-old.
Mr Trump reacted with predictable fury yesterday as details of the forthcoming book, Fear: Trump In The White House, paint a deeply unflattering picture of a chaotic administration whose most senior officials are not only trying to protect the president from himself, but also protect the world from Trump.
Claiming Woodward had ‘totally’ made up facts and produced a ‘picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact’, Trump huffed on Twitter that it might be time to change America’s libel laws.
‘Almost everyone agrees that my Administration has done more in less than two years than any other Administration in the history of our Country,’ he said. ‘I’m tough as hell on people & if I weren’t, nothing would get done. Also, I question everybody & everything — which is why I got elected!’
However, for all his bluster, the White House rebuttal process lacked some of the intensity with which officials went after the authors of previous critical accounts of the presidency, such as those by Michael Wolff and former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault.
It may have something to do with the fact that the painstaking Bob Woodward says he has hundreds of hours of taped interviews to back up his fact-gathering from anonymous sources (the most significant of which appear to be a clutch of senior ex-Trump aides).
Woodward has twisted the knife, passing to his old newspaper, The Washington Post, a toe-curlingly embarrassing 11-minute phone conversation he had with the president last month. Trump rang to berate him for not speaking to him before the book went to press. Nobody had ever told him, he griped.
As Woodward listed the various officials and politicians he had approached requesting an interview with the president, Trump called one of them — Kellyanne Conway — to the phone and she had to admit Woodward was correct.
Trump’s minders evidently didn’t want to let him anywhere near an experienced reporter like Woodward.
The book provides plenty of reasons why they were right to be cautious. We’ve heard already that Trump is dangerously out of his depth, intellectually and temperamentally unfit to be president.
However, some of the anecdotes winkled out by Woodward (who has written biographies of every president since Nixon) provide shocking new evidence of the terrifying state of affairs inside the administration.
As exasperated John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, reportedly told colleagues: ‘ We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us is here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.’
Perhaps most worryingly, much of the ‘ craziness’ cited by Woodward relates to foreign policy and national security, areas in which a maverick hand on the tiller could have disastrous consequences.
According to Woodward, Tom Bossert, the president’s adviser for homeland security, cyber security and counter-terrorism, once asked Trump if he had a minute to chat. ‘I want to watch the Masters,’ the golfloving president replied. ‘ You and your cyber... are going to get me in a war — with all your cyber s***.’
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Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, reportedly encountered a similarly alarming response from America’s commander-in-chief when he briefed him at Trump Tower in New York, before his inauguration, on the intelligence community’s findings that Russia had interfered in the presidential election.
‘l don’t believe in human sources,’ Trump told him. ‘These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country... I don’t trust human intelligence and these spies.’
If he really said that, it’s surely no surprise that — according to Woodward — Trump was once given a ‘Reader’s Digest version’ of a briefing about the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. The organisation is an ally of syria’s President Assad, whom Trump reportedly urged Defence secretary Jim Mattis to assassinate after his chemical weapons attack on civilians.
The president urged Mattis, ‘Let’s f***ing kill him’, say Woodward’s sources. Mattis, a former Marines general, is said to have told the president he would ‘get right on it’, but decided on a far more measured response, telling an aide: ‘We’re not going to do any of that.’ Mattis reportedly compared Trump’s knowledge of world affairs to that of a ‘fifth or sixth grader’ — equivalent to an 11 or 12-year- old — after he questioned the need for a U.s. military presence in south Korea.
More alarming than his sabrerattling over syria was Trump’s aggressive talk over nuclear-armed North Korea. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, was ‘rattled’ when, just a month into his presidency, Trump asked for a plan for a preemptive military strike on the unpredictable Kim Jong-un regime.
Trump reportedly told former White House staff secretary Rob Porter he saw it as a battle of wills with Kim: ‘This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim.’ (Porter reveals: ‘A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas’).
The president has a similarly grandiose view of his literary skills, claiming he was ‘the ernest Hemingway of 140 characters’ when Twitter raised the maximum size of an individual tweet from 140 to 280 characters. In fact, Woodward reveals, Trump orders his most popular tweets to be printed out so he can study them.
ex chief of staff Reince Priebus describes the presidential bedroom, where Trump taps out his often combative tweets, as ‘the devil’s workshop’, and early mornings and sunday nights — when the president is at a loose end — the ‘witching hour’.
Occasionally, it appears, aides dared to challenge the swaggering, domineering leader to his face rather than quietly ignore his decrees.
Former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn tried to pull up Trump — who is currently threatening trade wars across the globe — about his aggressive stance on international commerce. ‘several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views [ on trade]?”, writes Woodward.
‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’
‘That doesn’t mean they’re right,’ Cohn said bluntly.
It was Cohn who ‘stole a letter off Trump’s desk’ that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the U.s. from a trade deal with close ally south Korea.
He told a colleague he did it to protect national security, adding that the president hadn’t even noticed. Cohn — who repeatedly stole or hid papers with former staff secretary Rob Porter — reportedly offered to pull off the same outrageous stunt again when Trump ordered the drafting of a letter withdrawing the U.s. from its trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. ‘I can stop this,’ Cohn told fretting colleagues: ‘I’ll just take the paper off his desk.’
Woodward writes damningly of the significance of all this tomfoolery: ‘Members of his staff had joined [together] to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.’
Despite Trump’s best efforts (which apparently don’t stack up
to much) and repeated threats, the important U.S. trade deals with both South Korea and its North American neighbours remain intact.
According to the book, Trump is as brutally dismissive of his team as they are of him, the latter happily swapping notes on their experience of his stupidity, duplicity and stubbornness.
It seems some staff have tried to hint to him about their reservations, with former personal lawyer John Dowd warning him that if he spoke to the investigation into possible election collusion with Russia being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, he risked compromising himself.
‘Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange [prison] jumpsuit,’ Dowd reportedly told the president. Dowd decided Trump shouldn’t speak to the Mueller investigation because — after running through a mock interview — he became convinced the president couldn’t do it without lying, says Woodward.
The lawyer saw the ‘full nightmare’ of an interview, and felt Trump acted like an ‘aggrieved Shakespearean king’, says Woodward. Dowd rejected the claims.
Trump is said to have told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross point blank: ‘I don’t trust you... you’re past your prime.’ He’s reportedly been cruellest about his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying: ‘ This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner.’
Trump denies he said this, and both chief- of- staff Kelly ( who reportedly described him as an ‘idiot’ who’s ‘gone off the rails’) and defence secretary Mattis have rejected the book’s claims about how they have derided Trump. There was speculation last night that Trump may sack Mattis.
If he doesn’t have time for his generals, intelligence experts and business leaders, who does have the ear of the president?
Yesterday, reality TV star Kim Kardashian — who successfully pushed Trump to pardon a drug offender earlier this year — was welcomed back to the White House for another meeting about prison reform with senior aides including the president’s daughter Ivanka.
For a president who has two obsessions — TV and his celebrity image — this will have been an appointment worth clearing the diary for.