Rage

by Bob Woodward

Then on February 8, 2020, Kushner advised others on the four texts that he said someone in a quest to understand Trump needed to absorb. First, Kushner advised, go back and read a 2018 opinion column by The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Peggy Noonan. Her column on Trump said: “He’s crazy… and it’s kind of working.” Kushner made it clear that his endorsement of the column was not an aside or stray comment, but was central to understanding Trump. The son-in-law had to know that Noonan’s column, dated March 8, 2018, and titled “Over Trump, We’re As Divided As Ever,” was not positive. Rather it was quite devastating. In it she called Trump a “circus act” and “a living insult.” “What you feel is disquiet,” she wrote, “and you know what it’s about: the worrying nature of Mr. Trump himself… epic instability, mismanagement and confusion.” A conservative speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, Noonan wrote that with Trump, “We are not talking about being colorfully, craftily unpredictable, as political masters like FDR and Reagan sometimes were, but something more unfortunate, an unhinged or not-fully-hinged quality that feels like screwball tragedy.” Warming to her theme, Noonan wrote, “Crazy doesn’t last. Crazy doesn’t go the distance. Crazy is an unstable element that, when let loose in an unstable environment, explodes. And so your disquiet. Sooner or later something bad will happen.… It all feels so dangerous. “Expecting more from the president of th...