Rage

by Bob Woodward

Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide with about 675,000 deaths in the United States.

To preserve strict civilian control, the law prohibits anyone who has been a military officer in the last seven years from serving as defense secretary. The only exception had been World War II General George Marshall, who had received a waiver in 1950 and been a national hero.

Mattis had been commander of U.S. Central Command, known as CentCom, from 2010 to 2013, overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was fired by Obama due to his aggressiveness toward Iran when Obama was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran.

He called his mother, Lucille, who was 94 years old. She had served in Army intelligence in World War II. He knew she hated Trump. “How can you work for that man?” she asked. “Ma, last time I checked, I work for the Constitution. I’ll go back and read it again.” “All right,” she said. “All right.”

Putin is a terrible racist, as we all know. All Russians are, generally. And Obama had a terrible disdain for Putin.”

Uh-oh, Tillerson thought, here it comes, perhaps secretary of energy, a job that would be real easy to decline. “You’re the perfect guy to be my secretary of state,” the president-elect said.

Bradley Byers, 38, a former Marine F-18 fighter pilot who had flown combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, joined Mattis’s office as a civilian liaison to the White House.

Matt Pottinger—then

Representative Mike Pompeo, who had served three terms in the House, as CIA director. An evangelical Tea Party Republican, Pompeo, 52, graduated from West Point in 1986 first in his class of 973. He also had a Harvard Law degree.

Kim had seen enough of the government and the CIA to know people with the right ideas and right energy often got sucked into bureaucratic traditions and were never able to shake themselves loose and accomplish anything. Good people wanted to be the good guy in the system and the team, make no waves, get promoted to bigger and better jobs.

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, was summoned to the White House on Monday, May 8, four months into the Trump presidency.

Robert Mueller, then the acting U.S. attorney for Massachusetts,

“Let me know if you find anything that shows coordination or conspiracy with Russia,” Rosenstein instructed. That was the core mission.

When Trump was informed, he said, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked!”

36-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner,

“If you make the economic benefits big enough,” Kushner argued, “people will say yes.” Money was the key, just pump money. Trump talked that way also.

SBX—short for the sea-based X-band, self-propelled mobile radar floats that formed part of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system—signed on. Mattis watched silently as information came in rapidly. Uncertainty and dread mounted. Was this it?

the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia, set off the chain of events that triggered the war. By its end in 1918 more than 16 million soldiers and civilians had been killed.

Tillerson had called Trump a “fucking moron” at a July 20, 2017, Tank meeting. Probably nothing could have triggered Trump’s insecurities more.

Each of us gets to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we treat others.”

Somehow President Trump thinks when he says something it becomes reality.”

Mattis was frustrated with the message being sent to China, Russia and North Korea. “What we’re doing is we’re actually showing how to destroy America,” he said later. “That’s what we’re showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it’s working very well. We are declaring war on one another inside America. It’s actually working against us right now.”

summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018, Trump stood next to the Russian leader at a press conference and openly questioned the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Ted Gistaro, an up-and-coming CIA officer with two decades’ experience, was Trump’s principal briefer at the PDB sessions until 2019, when he was replaced by Beth Sanner. Gistaro,

in 2018, Mattis believed, the commander in chief had failed and let the country down.

“the treacherous curtain of deference” that comes down when someone is around high-level officials, especially presidents.

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.”

Top Secret intelligence classified as Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI)

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.

“While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Graham had served six years as an Air Force lawyer and several as the chief Air Force prosecutor in Europe.

Senior U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton, an appointee of George W. Bush, wrote that Barr “distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”

On May 23, 2019, Barr announced a new investigation into alleged spying on the Trump campaign, potentially by law enforcement and intelligence agency officials. The Justice Department was turning the tables.

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

Admiral Bill McRaven, who had led Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, had continuously mounted an aggressive, personal and public criticism of Trump. In an open letter to Trump published in The Washington Post in August 2018 after Trump revoked John Brennan’s security clearance, McRaven had written that the president had “embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.” He challenged Trump to revoke his security clearance: “I would consider it an honor.”

The unproven allegation was that Biden, who had the Ukraine account for the Obama administration, worked to block the investigation of Burisma, a large Ukrainian gas company. Biden’s son Hunter was a member of Burisma’s board and was reportedly paid $50,000 a month.

On the sixth hole—a 583-yard, par-five—Coats read Trump’s 4:45 p.m. tweet: “I am pleased to announce that highly respected Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas will be nominated by me to be the Director of National Intelligence… Dan Coats, the current director, will be leaving office on August 15th. I would like to thank Dan for his great service to our Country.”

The linkage between the withheld aid, which in the end totaled about $400 million, and Trump’s request for an investigation into the Bidens ultimately led the House of Representatives to impeach Trump.

DPRK stood for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the formal name of North Korea.

February 27 and 28, 2019, the North Korea–United States summit was held in Hanoi, Vietnam.

On June 30, 2019, Trump and Kim met at the Joint Security Area, a zone of distinctive blue buildings on the border of North Korea and South Korea.

“It was an honor that you asked me to step over that line,” Trump said. “And I was proud to step over the line.”

The 74-minute interview that afternoon was three months before the coronavirus pandemic consumed the United States and the world. It would be my first of 17 interviews with him for this book.

Trump did not dispute that Kim was also violent and vicious. He said that Kim “tells me everything. Told me everything. I know everything about him. He killed his uncle and he put the body right in the steps where the senators walked out. And the head was cut, sitting on the chest. Think that’s tough? You know, they think politics in this country’s tough.”

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.

“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.

We’re suckers.”

And the Bernie Sanders Democrats, they voted for me.”

It’s good stock.

Trump reported at least $434 million in income in 2018,