Often I wait a bit to read a political book. Media will give me the hottest quotations and if the book is big enough, will dominate discussion for a short time. I am sometimes skeptical the talking heads have read the book, but they have surely read other talkers talking about the book.
This is tedious.
Two types of book dominate the the political book that speaks to the moment as opposed to historical reflections. The first is the book-on-demand churned out to make money on the demand for information. There must be a good one written by someone sometime, but finding that rarity is not worth the effort. The other is really a long form newspaper article, featuring massive reporting that took so much time and effort that a book length treatment is necessary. Bob Woodward is that kind of reporter.
He tapes everything.
He has made controversial calls, occasionally called into question, but mostly feared. If he says it, he has a tape that can support it. Woodward is no friend to Republicans, but he is also an old-school liberal who believes in standards and arguments. If he could take down Trump, he would.
He could not and this book does not.
I waited to read his book Fear: Trump in the White House for a bit to see what came of it and then read it carefully. I tried to give the book the time the reporting deserved. My take is that book tells us one vital thing about President Trump, but a great deal about the people who (used) to work for President Trump.
The entire tome reads as a justification by people who assumed that by now the Trump presidency would be over or on the ropes. These sources are full of conventional wisdom on economic issues such as trade and Korea. On Korea, they look. .. wrong. The people leaking to Woodward, whose job is to collect such information, do not agree with the platform on issues like trade and immigration on which the President ran and was elected.
This book up to date a few months ago, reads dated just before the midterms.
Disagree with the President on trade, and Reagan Republicans will, but the President won an election on that issue. The book was written when withdrawing from NAFTA would be the End of the World as we know it. Instead, we withdrew from NAFTA and got USMCA . . . Widely praised on both sides of the aisle as better than NAFTA. The panic, the fear in the book is always from the aids, not from the President. As with Korea, the FEAR of the title was misplaced.
Aids handled the President to avoid what would be just fine, even better than fine. I finished this book disgusted with disloyal, self-serving leakers, who were not even obviously right.
This is not to justify the Trump Administration, just to point to the craven aids that squeeled to Woodward thinking the conventional wisdom would have justified them by now. It has not, to the contrary. Praise Woodward. His job is to feed the rats and so find what information they have taken to their nests.
On Russia, Woodward obviously found no evidence of collusion in his investigation. In fact, if the book has the facts, the Mueller report will find no collusion. It might find perjury.
And that is the key claim Woodward makes that is relevant to the President: he lies.
The claims of chaos in the White House are common when the press does not like an administration. Governance continues. Policy decisions and court appointments are not much different than what we would have seen on many issues with a President Kasich. On trade and foreign policy where the differences make a difference, the outcome is (so far) so good. The economy is strong and things are no worse than they were and in some areas (Syria, Korea) arguably better than the situation Obama left.
Yet grandmothers have prophesied for thousand years: “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Eventually, we deceive ourselves. Will this White House die in the web the President has made for himself?
We shall see.
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