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.
This book and Woodward’s previous tome covering the Trump administration, Fear, reveal that the standard relationship between Trump and any Cabinet member who does not offer absolute, unconditional, one-hundred percent approval of everything he does can be appropriately—if not perfectly—described as “contentious.” It is inevitable that disagreeing with Donald Trump inexorably leads to a parting of the ways. To term the relationship between Trump and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis as “contentious” is to engage in the wildest of understatements. Although Mattis has since leaving the administration been somewhat less constrained in his criticism, he has yet to go on record with the absolute truth of his feelings toward Trump both personally and relative to his foreign policy decisions in a way that is explicit as his expressions of disgust—and fear—in Woodward’s book. This quote may well be the single most definitive about the state of play within the White House that anyone who actually worked there during the Trump era had yet to make as the date of publication.
“He was at MIT for 42 years or something. He was a great—so I understand that stuff. You know, genetically.”
Trump is here referencing an uncle. Dr. John Trump was a physicist who instructed MIT students in the intricacies of electrical engineering. By all accounts, John Trump truly was a very intelligent man well-versed in his field. But what his nephew is insisting here is that somehow—in some unexplained and utterly inexplicable way—Donald himself managed to gain insight into some of that intelligence through a sort of osmosis. It is as if merely being related to someone smart enough to become a physicist means that he actually is equipped with a knowledge of physics organically. In other words, Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States is implying that he knows stuff that it took his uncle years of schooling and working to learn not by reading or studying or even asking questions of his uncle…but merely by sharing the same genes. Again, to make the point clear: this is the implication at play here in this quote by the sitting President of the United States.
When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.
This is not just the assertion of the narrator. It is the final line of the book. It is the quote which draws the curtain on the almost Shakespearean tragedy (in which America itself is the tragic character) which has preceded it. Over the course of nearly four-hundred pages, the narrator has outlined not just a tragedy, but a tragedy which should never have occurred and, once it did, should never have continued. It is a tragedy that began with a ridiculous anti-democratic system for processing the counting of votes for the one position in the government which every American has the right to choose; a system which actually allows the person with the second-most votes to be declared the “winner.” That tragedy was then compounded—and delineated in detail by the author across two different books—by decision of Americans invested with the power to stop things who simply looked at the wrath and said no.
Bob Woodward is famous for being a journalist who turns even himself into a third-person character. The book which established his reputation, All the President’s Men, infamously begins with the description: “Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake.” For the first time reader, it is a bit jarring, forcing many to close the book and recheck the cover for details of authorship. Those co-authors, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, become characters, but detached from the writers themselves, appearing in the narrative as if created by someone entirely different. Woodward has retained this structural template and as a result, none of his previous book contain such a withering statement of intensely personal opinion as that established here with this frank assertion divorced from objectivity.
