Rage

by Bob Woodward

“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.”

“When’s the last time you apologized?” “Oh, I don’t know, but I think over a period—I would apologize. Here’s the thing: I’m never wrong. Okay. No, if I’m wrong—if I’m wrong—I believe in apologizing. This was a totally appropriate conversation. It was perfect. And again, if I did something wrong, I would apologize. Okay?”

“I will, but I disagree with you so much,” Trump said. “It wouldn’t matter what she said.” I pressed one last time. What would he do if Ivanka thought he should apologize? “It wouldn’t matter what she said,” he repeated.

According to the CDC, a hashtag, translated as #WuhanReportedMysteriousPneumonia, was being actively censored on Chinese social media.

Fauci called his team from the Vaccine Research Center together. Let’s start making a vaccine, Fauci directed. Who the hell knows where this is going? So the center began work right away and launched the vaccine project Moderna later bought that was a positive prospect for a vaccine.

Pottinger also calculated the death rate for Hubei province, whose capital was Wuhan, could be six times normal.

“Hard to believe that Jeff Bezos is not controlling what’s happening.” It was clear that if Trump had owned a newspaper, he would be actively involved.

O’Brien was convinced that Huawei wanted to use its fifth generation (5G) wireless network eventually to monitor every citizen in the world.

Trump’s misstatements of fact are not regrettable errors or ethical lapses, but part of a technique called “intentional wrongness persuasion.” Adams argues Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues, and “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.”

“Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. This was his core understanding of communication strategy in the age of the internet and Trump.

“Neither party is really a party. They’re collections of tribes,” he observed at one White House meeting. “The Republican Party was a collection of a bunch of tribes. Look at the Republican Party platform. It’s a document meant to piss people off, basically, because it’s done by activists.” Kushner’s theory was there was a “disproportionality between what issues people are vocal on and what the people, the voters, really care about.”

Kushner calls this a “data-palooza,”

Graham believed Trump’s decision to shut down for 15 days was probably the first time in Trump’s life when he had to make a decision that was not in his best interest politically or financially. Graham was convinced Trump did it because he believed he had the power to save people’s lives. He had chosen the road that would be the most detrimental to his number-one issue—the economy.

“It’s not to stop the spread,” Redfield said. “We were now in a race. I think we all understood now we were in a race. We’re in a marathon. We’re in a two-year, three-year race. Not a one-year, not a six-month race. The race is to slow and contain this virus as much as humanly possible, with all our efforts, till we can get a highly efficacious vaccine deployed for all the American people and then beyond that to the rest of the world.”

“This virus will stop when it basically infects more than 70 percent of the world, or 80 percent of the world,” Redfield told others. “Or the world develops a biological countermeasure that stops it,” he added, referring to a vaccine.

I began to ask Trump if he ever sat down alone with Fauci to get a tutorial on the science behind the virus when the president cut in. “Yes, I guess, but honestly there’s not a lot of time for that, Bob. This is a busy White House. We’ve got a lot of things happening. And then this came up.” No matter how busy or what other things were happening, I frankly wondered what could be more important. Trump had carved out hours to talk with me.

“And in one day, this thing came in and we had a choice to make,” Trump continued. “Close everything up and save potentially millions of lives—you know, hundreds of thousands of lives—or don’t do anything and look at body bags every day being taken out of apartment buildings.” “Who told you that?” I asked. “It was me,” Trump said. “I told me that.”

Obama’s National Security Council had left behind a 69-page document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” that included instructions for dealing with novel influenza viruses which “would produce an estimate of between 700,000 and 1.4 billion fatalities from a pandemic of a virulent influenza virus strain.” The document recommended officials in the early stages of such a pandemic check the nation’s diagnostic testing capacity and the amount of personal protective equipment available for health care workers.

When asked what he had done to prepare hospitals and ramp up testing with the extra time Trump said he bought by being ahead of schedule, the president called the reporter “disgraceful.”

“This was an attempted and failed coup,” Trump said.

“You’re risking getting it, of course,” I said. “The way you move around and have those briefings and deal with people. Are you worried about that?” “No, I’m not. I don’t know why I’m not. I’m not,” he said. “Why?” “I don’t know. I’m just not.”

I’m the one that decides everything, Trump said. “Mr. President, all your haters would love nothing more than you make all the decisions,” Graham said.

I told him people I talked to were saying the presidential race between him and Biden was now a coin toss. “You know, maybe,” he said. “And maybe not.” That sounded like a good description of a coin toss.

He noted that Katie Miller, press spokesperson for Vice President Pence, had just tested positive “out of the blue. That is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.… She was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.”

O’Brien described an apocalyptic wasteland gleaned from social media, before it was removed by government censors. “They welded people into their apartments. They eventually came in a couple weeks later and pried open the doors and opened up, there were a lot of elderly people that died of dehydration and starvation. There were all kinds of people that hung themselves out their windows.”

They really locked down all of Wuhan at one point. I think they quarantined over 11 million people. You couldn’t go from Wuhan to Beijing, but you could go Wuhan to London.”

“Is that your Bible?” a reporter asked. “It’s a Bible,” Trump answered.

“Did somebody help you?” “Yeah, I get people. They come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. The ideas are mine. Want to know something? Everything’s mine. You know, everything is mine.”

“If it weren’t for the Democratic Party, the Republican Party would fold,” Graham said. “They always keep us in the game. They’re able to throw us a lifeline. So this defund the police, occupation of Seattle and this crazy shit is going to put you back in the game.

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.

“His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said privately.

As part of Operation Warp Speed, drug companies were being prepaid billions of dollars to manufacture millions of doses of drugs that might not pass trials or even be used.

do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated and put you in a cave, to a certain extent, as it put me—and I think lots of white, privileged people—in a cave? And that we have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country?” “No,” Trump said. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you,” he said, his voice mocking and incredulous. “Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

“Do you think there is systematic or institutional racism in this country?” I asked. “Well, I think there is everywhere,” Trump said. “I think probably less here than most places. Or less here than many places.” “But,” I asked, “is it here in a way that it has an impact on people’s lives?” “I think it is. And it’s unfortunate. But I think it is.” He had at least said it.

“The question is, where are we now?” I asked. “We’re in great shape,” Trump said. “Most of the country is headed absolutely away from the virus. We’re totally set with our hospitals. We’re totally set.” “Okay, but it’s on fire, sir,” I said.

“What I’ve learned in the world of Trump is news cycles don’t last very long,” Kushner said on Monday, July 13,

Kushner continued, “The whole thing with polling is it’s about getting likely voters, number one, as opposed to registered voters. Public polling is using registered voters, not likely, and they’re definitely skewing the turnout model. And so we believe it is a different race than other people believe.”

I’ve come to the conclusion that 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.

They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country.

I close out this book with a belief that almost anything can happen in the Trump presidency—anything. Lots could get better or worse or much worse. It is unlikely lots could get much better.