Rage

by Bob Woodward

Mattis and Wei resumed their walk after dinner. “Those last guys,” Wei asked. “Who were they?” “They’re Marines.” “They look very fit.” “They run three miles in 18 minutes. And they’re all at over 21 pull-ups.”

Mattis noted how the nations of the Pacific region had stood up to various forces over the past 200 years. “No one country is going to dominate the Pacific,” he said. “History is very 100 percent compelling on it. If you think you’re going to take over the Pacific, you’ll just be the fourth who thought so,” he said, referring to the European colonialists, fascist and militarist powers, and Soviet communists who had made attempts.

Fingers took Mattis’s guidance and cited Eisenhower’s advice: If a problem can’t be solved easily, make it bigger.

“I didn’t know we had so many fucking judges,” Graham said. “I think every town’s got a judge. Some are a little wacky. Most of them are really good. But a few outliers. The problem is when you only need a simple majority, you don’t need to go outside your own party.”

Fuck lindsey graham for this

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.”

Trump said at 9:00 that evening. “From the beginning of time, nations and people have faced unforeseen challenges, including large-scale and very dangerous health threats,” Trump read. “This is the way it always was and always will be. It only matters how you respond.”

“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.”

But as the sun set over Washington that evening, Kushner’s best was not enough. His attempt to work below the waves overlooked that many waves were caused by Trump himself. Kushner’s efforts were those of one person in an ambiguously defined role, attempting to remake parts of the government bureaucracy in the image of a streamlined corporation. This would likely be impossible without clear presidential leadership under the best of circumstances.

“Don’t worry about the base,” Graham said. “Nobody elected you as a fiscal conservative.”