Rage

by Bob Woodward

At the next day’s briefing, Trump said, “Stay calm. It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.”

Trump wasn’t buying it. In golf every player had a favorite club he wanted to hit, especially under pressure, and Graham knew that the president wanted to use his “go-to shot” of division.

Trump had initially resisted criminal justice reform, known as the First Step Act, reforming prisons and sentencing passed by Congress and signed into law in 2018, but Kushner had pushed it hard and it passed with large bipartisan majorities. It was working politically so Trump now clung to it. Graham realized Trump rewrote the history on that and said he had always been for it.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reenergize America,” Graham told Trump. “If you do these three things right”—DACA, police reform and infrastructure—“you will have a more consequential presidency and you are more likely to get reelected. If you try to be the law-and-order president alone, you’re going to lose.”

again that the virus would disappear, Fauci decided he had better be the skunk at the picnic at the next task force meeting, which was held in the Oval Office and was supposed to be confidential.

Two days earlier, The Wall Street Journal had published an excerpt of former national security adviser John Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. In it, Bolton wrote of a meeting between Trump and Xi: “Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

“I’ve done more for the Black community than any president in history with the possible exception of Lincoln,” repeating one of his favorite lines. He had said so publicly at least five times by that point in 2020 alone.