In Bob Woodward's 'Rage,' a Reporter and a President From Different Universes

[brooklynite]

New York Times

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 harbors 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 tantalized 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, Trump explicitly told 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 Woodward the month before, “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” but he preferred “to always play it down.” Yet the discrepancy between what Trump knew (the virus was bad) and what he said (it’s all good) was already reported in April. 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 Trump that emerges in “Rage” is impetuous and self-aggrandizing — in other words, immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention. Woodward reminds us at several points that he diligently conducted 17 on-the-record interviews with the president. “In one case,” Woodward 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 seven-month period from December 2019 to July 2020. After his first book on Trump, “Fear,” was published two years ago, 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. Woodward is predictably coy about his sources, saying only that he drew from “hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants and witnesses to these events,” nearly all of whom spoke to him on “deep background.”