Rage

by Bob Woodward

Finally, Coats decided he would look at the tweets in the morning, concluding he could not let himself get in the habit of thinking he had to wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. just to see if there were any tweets. It was also clear to Coats that the tweeting meant Trump was not sleeping. What were the president’s sleep hours? Coats heard the president was starting his work day later and later, now 11:30 a.m. Maybe that was a clue.

“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.”

The president called White House counsel Don McGahn at home twice on June 17, 2017, and ordered him to have Mueller removed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “Call Rod, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can’t be the special counsel,” Trump said in the second call. “Call me back when you do it.” McGahn did not follow through on the president’s orders.

The NSA and CIA had evidence, highly classified, that the Russians had placed malware in the election registration system in at least two counties in Florida—St. Lucie County and Washington County. There was no evidence yet that the malware had been activated. It was sitting there to be used. The voting system vendor used by Florida was used by state election registration systems all around the country. 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.

Normally, if a target of U.S. foreign intelligence is under surveillance while speaking with an American citizen, the citizen’s identity is “masked” in the intelligence report with a placeholder such as “US Person 1.” Unmasking was routine when an intelligence or other official needed to know the identity of the U.S. citizen in order to understand the report. For example, if a foreign ambassador were to speak to a U.S. citizen while under surveillance, it would be routine for an intelligence official reviewing the report to request the unmasking of the name of the citizen.

The U.S. Navy was apoplectic over the Chinese expansion into what was internationally considered free and open seas, and where it regularly conducted freedom of navigation exercises.

'Apopleptic' - unusually emotive language in a book that usually sems to aspire to tell the simple unadorned truth.

“I’ll just tell you,” Mattis said, “the country I would most be willing to fight would be one whose entire officer corps had never heard a shot fired at them. War is so different from training that a shock wave will go through them. I’ve got—probably 80 percent of my officers have been shot at in one form or another. But I’d prefer not to put them through another war.”

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? Coats could see no other explanation.

The CIA never figured out conclusively who wrote and crafted Kim’s letters to Trump. They were masterpieces. The analysts marveled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being center stage in history.

One calculation was that 22,000 people a day came into the United States from China. At the end of the week over 100,000 people were coming from a country that had already shut themselves down because of the coronavirus.

“In the beginning,” Kushner told others, referring to the first years of the administration, “20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump. “Now, I think we have the inverse. I think 80 of the people working for him think that he’s saving the world, and 20 percent—maybe less now—think they’re saving the world from Trump.” Let that analysis sink in: Twenty percent of the president’s staff think they are “saving the world” from the president.

According to Kushner, one of Trump’s greatest impacts was on the Republican Party. “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.”

On March 9, with the stock market reeling, Trump tweeted, “Last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

“It was difficult to understand how China had aggressive travel restrictions within China, and yet did not move to any travel restrictions” for people who wanted to leave China and go abroad, Redfield said. “If there could have been one major, global action that could’ve really saved hundreds of thousands of lives, it’s if they had just shut down their out-of-China travel at the same time they shut down their intra-China travel. “They really started moving in the latter part of January. That’s where they quarantined people. That’s where they shut down the city. That’s where they stopped the trains. 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.”

A 31-year-old unbending Trump campaign spokesperson and Harvard Law School graduate, McEnany limited Fauci’s television appearances. Under the system, all the networks and cable news outlets had to submit a request for a Fauci interview in writing to the Department of Health and Human Services, who then in turn would pass it to the White House for approval. It was like the requests were disappearing into a black hole. No action, no response. One in ten of the requests would be approved so it would not look like Fauci was being completely muzzled.

Two days earlier, The Wall Street Journal had published an excerpt of former national security adviser John Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened. In it, Bolton wrote of a meeting between Trump and Xi: “Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

“I think,” Kushner continued, “that for five years”—since Trump started to run—“he basically was on offense. And then for four and a half months”—since the virus exploded—“he was on defense. And the goal is to get him back to offense.” The offense soon appeared. First, the White House released a document listing the number of times Fauci had been wrong in his predictions about Covid-19, a highly unusual and, from a health point of view, irresponsible effort to undermine the chief of infectious diseases. Fauci had privately acknowledged he was not by any means always correct. But polling showed that he was trusted by at least twice as many people as Trump.

Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. 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.

On briefing Trump, Fauci told an associate, “His attention span is like a minus number. His sole purpose is to get reelected.”