Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

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.

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

“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.”

“We’ve got to continue to have open borders,” Cohn said. The employment picture was so favorable that the United States would run out of workers soon. So immigration had to continue. “We have many jobs in this country that Americans won’t do.”

the Trump Organization’s business credit score was a 19 out of 100, below the national average by 30 points, and that it could have difficulty borrowing money.

But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”