Rage

by Bob Woodward

“It goes through air,” Trump said. “That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

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

“We are a consumer-driven economy,” Cohn said, reminding the president of the consequences of imposing tariffs. “And the prices are going to go up. And that’s going to have a significant impact on our gross domestic product”—overall economic growth.

Trump added, “Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

“The president has no moral compass,” Mattis replied. The bluntness should have shocked Coats, but he’d arrived at his own hard truths about the most powerful man in the world. “True,” Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

President Trump’s detachment compounded the problem for Mattis. “I never cared much what Trump said,” Mattis said privately, because Trump’s orders were so random, impulsive and unthoughtful.

Mattis was taken completely by surprise that Trump had canceled the training exercises with South Korea.

“They said they think it’s Russia,” Trump said. “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia.” He added, “I don’t see any reason why it would be.… President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial.” Trump had met with Putin for over two hours alone without any other U.S. official present other than the translator.

Coats knew that key leaders such as Putin, Xi of China and Erdogan of Turkey would lie to Trump. They played Trump skillfully. They would roll out the red carpet for him, flatter him, then do what they wanted.

The Russian malware was sophisticated and could be activated in counties with particular demographics. For instance, in areas with higher percentages of Black residents, the malware could erase every tenth voter, almost certainly reducing the total vote count for Democrats. The same could potentially be activated to reduce Trump votes in Republican districts.

Pompeo was successful in showing that withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan—one of the president’s longtime goals, even obsessions—would risk another 9/11 style attack.

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.”

Jared Kushner’s unorthodox ties to foreign leaders and regular conversations with them outside secure channels raised suspicions among the intelligence agencies.

His interim Top Secret security clearance was downgraded and ultimately denied. The rejection meant Kushner could not have access to sensitive intelligence, impeding his ability to work.

White House chief of staff John Kelly wanted Kushner’s security clearance handled by the book, but the president personally ordered that Kushner be granted the highest security clearance. This gave him access to Top Secret intelligence classified as Sensitive Compartmented...

But Coats continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump. How else to explain the president’s behavior?

Mueller’s report stated that while it did not “conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

“It’s complete exoneration,” Trump added—directly contradicting the Barr letter, which quoted the Mueller report’s statement that it “does not exonerate him.”

The basis for Mueller’s criticism became evident once the report was made public in April 2019 and could be compared to Barr’s four-page summary.

Walton wrote that Barr failed to note in his letter that Mueller’s probe “identified multiple contacts… between Trump campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.” On the obstruction issue, Walton wrote, Barr “failed to disclose to the American public” that the reason Mueller determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment was because of the Justice Department’s policy against charging a sitting president with a federal crime.

Ultimately, Mueller’s investigation led to 34 indictments, including Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, national security adviser Michael Flynn, political confidant Roger Stone and a number of Russian nationals.

“He’s dangerous,” Mattis said. “He’s unfit.”

Then Trump digressed to reveal something extraordinary—a secret new weapons system. “I have built a nuclear—a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody—what we have is incredible.”

Later I found sources who confirmed the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system but no one wanted to provide details and were surprised Trump had disclosed it.

The military always tells you the alliances with NATO and South Korea are the best bargain the United States makes, I noted, a great investment in joint defense. “The military people are wrong,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t say they were stupid, because I would never say that about our military people. But if they said that, they—whoever said that was stupid.

As I listened, I was struck by the vague, directionless nature of Trump’s comments. He had been president for just under three years, but couldn’t seem to articulate a strategy or plan for the country.

I said I thought he was misguided in his blanket criticism of the media as “fake news.” Yes, everyone got things wrong sometimes. But he ought to understand the common denominator was the “good faith effort” with real sources. “Well,” he joked, “I have Russia and Sean Hannity with me.”

“I get along very well with Erdogan, even though you’re not supposed to because everyone says ‘What a horrible guy,’ ” Trump said. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a repressive leader with a terrible record on human rights. “But for me it works out good. It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

In May 2019, Trump had used his emergency authority to bypass the objections of Congress and sell the Saudis $8 billion in arms.

Bolton, in what the Times described an “explosive account,” wrote that Trump told him that he wanted $391 million in security aid to Ukraine frozen until the Bidens were investigated—the subject of the impeachment.

In total, 10 Republican senators who voted to acquit said in statements or interviews Trump’s actions were wrong, improper or inappropriate.

Liberated from constraints, they moved money from Pentagon budgets for construction and antidrug programs to pay for the wall.

Testifying before Congress, Fauci said that testing for the virus was “failing. I mean, let’s admit it.” The distribution of faulty test kits had prevented officials and scientists from getting a clear picture of the number of infections in the crucial early days of the virus’s spread across the U.S. By the beginning of March, fewer than 500 tests had been conducted.

That same day, Kushner got another grim wake-up call. He was working on ramping up more testing sites and went to a briefing at the Health and Human Services offices. We’ve got bad news, he was told. There are only 1.2 million swabs available for administering tests in the country.

You know when it attacks, it attacks the lungs. And I don’t know—when people get hit, when they get hit, and now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too, plenty of young people.”

The shortage of protective face masks for medical workers was a full-blown crisis. The stockpile was about 40 million masks—1 percent of what was needed.

Counties that are majority-Black “have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are the majority,”

Fauci, Birx and Redfield worked on a plan. Governors could allow schools, businesses and other public spaces to reopen in a three-phase process once their states showed a 14-day downward trajectory in coronavirus cases.

Governors rushed to restart their states’ economies following the release of the administration’s plan, even though many did not meet the criteria for reopening. Georgia governor Brian Kemp had on April 20 said he would allow “gyms, hair salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors” to open in four days. Trump opposed the move in public. “I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia,” he said at the April 22 task force briefing. But the next day, Trump changed course and began praising governors who were reopening their states.

Trump had poured gasoline on the tensions. Graham wished Trump would, instead, “appoint a presidential commission to deal with policing and race. And then get tough on the protesters.” The key was to redefine the way police interacted with their communities. Graham wondered, “Do you really want to deploy the active-duty military against Americans unless you have to? The military has a lot of respect from everybody. Do you really want to get them in the middle of this shitshow?” “Right now his presidency’s very much at risk,” Graham said. “This thing has the potential now to eat him alive.”

On April 17, in the middle of what was supposed to be the 30-day extension of the “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” Trump tweeted “Liberate Minnesota,” “Liberate Michigan,” and “Liberate Virginia,” expressing support for a subversion of his own guidelines. Fauci’s jaw dropped. He asked his colleagues, What was going on?

Fauci marveled at Trump, who would hopscotch from one topic to another. “His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said privately.

the “dynamite behind the door” was in plain sight. It was Trump himself. The oversized personality. The failure to organize. The lack of discipline. The lack of trust in others he had picked, in experts. The undermining or the attempted undermining of so many American institutions. The failure to be a calming, healing voice. The unwillingness to acknowledge error. The failure to do his homework. To extend the olive branch. To listen carefully to others. To craft a plan.

The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country.

Decision by tweet, often without warning to those charged with executing his policies, was one of the biggest sticks of dynamite behind the door.

Trump has, instead, enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency. When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.