Rage

by Bob Woodward

“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told me. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

“Pretty amazing. This is more deadly” than the flu, maybe five times more so.

Yet the unexpected headline from the call was also his detailed knowledge of the virus and his description of it as so deadly so early in February, more than a month before it began to engulf him, his presidency and the United States. And so at odds with his public tone.

“You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can control your response.”

‘You need to remember we’re a nuclear power. As powerful as you. You Americans think you won the Cold War. You did not win the Cold War. We never fought that war. We could have, but we didn’t.’ And that put chills up my spine.”

“I got over enjoying public humiliation by second grade,” Mattis once told the president.

Mattis later described for others what it was like to attend meetings with Trump: “It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it could go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him.

Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”