Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

Despite almost daily reports of chaos and discord in the White House, the public did not know how bad the internal situation actually was. Trump was always shifting, rarely fixed, erratic.

Cohn removed the letter draft from the Resolute Desk. He placed it in a blue folder marked “KEEP.” “I stole it off his desk,” he later told an associate. “I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.”

“It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said privately. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”

They smothered the president with facts and logic.

he had a permanently world-weary demeanor.

The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined 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.

“I love that. That’s what I am,” Trump said, “a popularist.” He mangled the word.

“I’ve got to do that,” Trump said. “All these fucking Democrats run all the cities. You’ve got to build hotels. You’ve got to grease them. Those are people who came to me.”

“an old guy with a baseball bat. You go in there and you’ve got to give him something—normally in cash. If you don’t give him anything, nothing gets done. Nothing gets built. But if you take it in there and you leave him an envelope, it happens. That’s just the way it is. But I can fix that.”

I would recommend you run as if you are running for governor in three states—Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. They were the first three caucus or primary states. “Run and sound local, like you want to be their governor.” A

“Not a chance. Zero chance,” Bannon repeated. “Less than zero. Look at the fucking life he’s got, dude. Come on. He’s not going to do this. Get his face ripped off.”

It is almost certain that if events had not unfolded in the following unlikely, haphazard, careless way, the world would be vastly different today.

Breitbart had stood by Trump in his darker hours. “This is going to be the end of Breitbart.”

There was only one path forward: escalation on all fronts. Maximize aggression to conceal vital weakness.

Trump arrived and sat down. Hot dogs and hamburgers were laid out. The fantasy diet of an 11-year-old kid, Bannon thought, as Trump wolfed down two hot dogs.

He attacked the mainstream media with relish, especially the Times—but despite the full-takedown language, he considered the Times the paper of record and largely believed its stories.

“The elites in the country are comfortable with managing the decline. Right?”

“Number one,” Bannon went on, “we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country. And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.”

Trump seemed to agree that Hillary was a neoconservative. “She’s supported every war out there,” Bannon said. “We’re just going to hammer. That’s it. Just stick to that.”

The voters were disillusioned with Republican presidential nominees. These arguments went, “You have to get behind Mitt Romney. He’s the only one who can win. You have to support John McCain. He can win. Jeb can win. Marco can win. This one,” Trump, you, “can’t win. The people decided. I will not be fooled again,” and he had won the Republican nomination.

270 electoral votes. They needed to target the right states, the roughly eight battleground states.

Priebus had spent the last years overseeing a massive effort to rebuild the RNC into a data-driven operation. Borrowing from Obama’s winning campaign strategy, the RNC started pouring vast sums—eventually more than $175 million—into analytics and big data, tracking individual primary voters, and using that information in areas divided into neighborhood “turfs” staffed with armies of volunteers.

The first step was for field staff to get an absentee or early voting ballot to those they deemed pro-Trump because they scored a 90 or above on a scale of 0 to 100 in the national database.

“I realized,” Bannon said later, “I’m the director, he’s the actor.”

“This is Götterdämmerung,” the final battle, he said. Manafort’s departure was announced on August 19.

Signs of Russian “reconnoitering,” or digital intrusions as the National Security Agency called them, first appeared in local and state electoral boards’ computerized voter registration rolls—lists of voters’ names and addresses—in the summer of 2015.

mantra always was PROTECT THE SOURCES. Yet, he wanted to do something.

Giuliani appeared on all five, completing what is called a full Ginsburg—a term in honor of William H. Ginsburg, the attorney for Monica Lewinsky, who appeared on all five network Sunday programs on February 1, 1998.

“When I saw her go to Arizona, I said, they’ve lost their fucking minds,” Bannon said. “What are they doing?”

“We must reclaim our country’s destiny and dream big and bold and daring. “We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”

And you’ve got to remember, no preparation, no transition team.”

“This is the Island of Misfit Toys,” Bannon said. “How the fuck are we going to put together a government? We relieve the watch in 10 weeks at noon. We’ve got to be up and running.”

Mattis was both a warrior and comforter. Bannon soon was calling him “the Secretary of Assurance” and “the moral center of gravity of the administration.”

Putin had awarded Tillerson the Russian Order of Friendship in 2013.

The American economy overall is in okay shape, Cohn told Trump, but it was ready to experience a growth explosion if certain actions were taken. To achieve this, the economy needed tax reform and the removal of the shackles of overregulation.

We’re a trade-based economy, he said. Free, fair and open trade was essential.

Second, the United States is an immigration center to the world. “We’ve got to continue to have open borders,” Cohn said.

“We have many jobs in this country that Americans won’t do.”

“If you’re here eight years, you’re going to deal with the automation of the automobile and truck. About 25 percent of the U.S. population makes a living driving something. Think about that.”

“The president-elect is taking on this plate of shit throughout the world. The world is a mess. There’s lots of cleaning up to do.”

Hoover, the CIA had its own ghost. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA made a huge mistake. In part as a result of lies told by a key source—amazingly code-named “Curveball”—who claimed he had worked in a mobile chemical weapons lab in Iraq, the CIA had concluded that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

his book, Comey offers a description, perhaps to demonstrate his keen eye: “His suit jacket was open and his tie too long, as usual. His face appeared slightly orange, with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coiffed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his. I remember wondering how long it must have taken him in the morning to get that done. As he extended his hand, I made a mental note to check its size. It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.”

They wanted the formal assessment to be believed by the president-elect. Why pollute it with the dossier summary?

NATO is often considered the most successful effort to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and a foundation of Western unity.

Trump lashed out, suggesting that McCain had taken the coward’s way out of Vietnam as a prisoner of war.

President Trump is a good listener, Mattis said, as long as you don’t hit one of his third rails—immigration

Next to be interviewed was John Bolton, a far-right former U.N. ambassador. He was a summa cum laude graduate from Yale who supported the Iraq War and promoted regime change in Iran and North Korea.

The younger Kim accepted failures in tests, apparently absorbing the practical lesson: Failure is inevitable on the road to success. Under Kim Jong Un, the scientists lived to learn from their mistakes, and the weapons programs improved.

That was unthinkable to Obama. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009 he said, “War promises human tragedy,” and “War at some level is an expression of human folly.” Frustrated and exasperated, he rejected a preemptive strike. It was folly.

There was a single argument he made, Clapper said, that the North Koreans had not pushed back on during his 2014 visit. The United States, he had argued, has no permanent enemies. Look, he said, we had a war with Japan and Germany but now are friends with both.