Rage Quotes

“Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Nobody believes—even the people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing what he says.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“He’s the kind of person that would inspire crazy people.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Let that analysis sink in: Twenty percent of the president’s staff think they are “saving the world” from the president.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“A president must be willing to share the worst with the people, the bad news with the good. All presidents have a large obligation to inform, warn, protect, to define goals and the true national interest. It should be a truth-telling response to the world, especially in crisis. Trump has, instead, enshrined personal impulse as a governing principle of his presidency.
“When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

- Bob Woodward, Rage, pp. 391-2 (emphasis added).”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“This degradation of the American experiment is real. This is tangible. Truth is no longer governing the White House statements. Nobody believes—even the people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing what he says.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“When combined, Kushner’s four texts painted President Trump as crazy, aimless, stubborn and manipulative. I could hardly believe anyone would recommend these as ways to understand their father-in-law, much”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“But now, 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. 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”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“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.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“You need to remember we’re a nuclear power. As powerful as you. You Americans think you won the Cold War. You did not win the Cold War. We never fought that war. We could have, but we didn’t.’ And that put chills up my spine.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.” Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa on March 31, 2016, at the Old Post Office Pavilion, Trump International Hotel, Washington, D.C.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“For Redfield it was one of the most difficult times of his four-decade professional life. “15 Days to Slow the Spread” was important, but not enough. In private he told others of his deepest fears. “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.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Trump’s impact on the country would be lasting. “This degradation of the American experiment is real. This is tangible. Truth is no longer governing the White House statements. Nobody believes—even the people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing what he says.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said privately.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“He was at MIT for 42 years or something. He was a great—so I understand that stuff. You know, genetically.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Mattis had a general operating philosophy which he articulated many times over the years: “You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can control your response.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“A person always needed allies. And this was the tragedy of Trump’s leadership and the bottom line: “It was inexplicable to think otherwise. It was indefensible. It was jingoism. It was a misguided form of nationalism. It was not patriotism.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“The Fox News network, especially opinion broadcaster Sean Hannity, had a Svengali-like influence on Trump that Rosenstein privately labeled “malicious.” Too many right-wing nuts had influence. He also found no comfort or credibility with mainstream media reporters, who he believed were prisoners of their partisan sources.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“We’re going to put a tariff on all steel and aluminum, on everything coming in,” the president said, “and see what happens.” This approach drove Gary Cohn, the chief White House economic adviser, crazy. He had argued passionately that the American economy was too important to haphazardly experiment with.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Then the next day, Christmas, Kim wrote Trump a much longer letter describing their Singapore meeting in almost romantic prose. “It has been 200 days since the historic DPRK-US summit in Singapore this past June, and the year is now almost coming to an end. Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day. As I mentioned at that time, I feel very honored to have established an excellent relationship with a person such as Your Excellency”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“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.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“I'm not reading between the lines," Wallace replied. "I'm reading the lines.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Pero los días malos eran más frecuentes. Coats empezó a pensar que Trump era impermeable a los hechos. Tenía sus propios hechos: casi todo el mundo era idiota, y casi todos los países estaban estafando a Estados Unidos. La corriente constante de quejas resultaba extenuante. La tensión no bajaba nunca, y Coats no quería retorcer los hechos para que cuadraran con las ideas preconcebidas o los deseos del presidente. Estaba conmocionado.”
― Bob Woodward, Rabia

“Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings responsible to one another and to God.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Seven hours later, Trump gave a long statement at his first Coronavirus Task Force press conference in three months. He spoke alone at the White House. No Pence, Fauci or Birx. He also shifted tone. Everything was not rosy with the outlook for the virus. “It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Trump said injecting an unusual dose of realism. “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.” Previously Trump had been reluctant to wear a mask. “Get a mask,” he said. “Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect and we need everything we can get.” His comments were a tacit acknowledgment that his previous approach had not worked, and that, in fact, the virus was much worse.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago,” Mattis wrote, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander in chief, with military leadership standing alongside.… “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try,” he continued. “Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“For CDC chief Redfield the Chinese failure to close down international flights was disastrous. He told colleagues the United States had silently filled with Covid-19 infections “from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium.” All this late-winter travel brought clusters of Covid to the United States. “Also unknown to us that probably half of those clusters weren’t even symptomatic, so you couldn’t find them” with airport screening. “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.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“Georgia governor Brian Kemp had on April 20 said he would allow “gyms, hair salons, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors” to open in four days. Trump opposed the move in public. “I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia,” he said at the April 22 task force briefing. But the next day, Trump changed course and began praising governors who were reopening their states.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“I hung up, feeling distressed. Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states. There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced. Beyond being a reporter, I was worried for the country.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“I could find no support for Trump’s claim, repeated several times in public remarks, that the Obama administration left behind “obsolete” or “broken” tests. 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.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage