Trump uncut: a review of Bob Woodward’s Fear

For all the talk of what Bob Woodward’s book Fear is, it is more telling to describe what it isn’t. This isn’t Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. It isn’t Omarosa Newman’s Unhinged. It isn’t even what Donald Trump feared it would be: “a negative book” or a “bad one”. It is a sober and surprisingly sympathetic report from inside the Trump White House; one of those books “by some of the people that knew him” that history occasionally throws up around significant figures. Here the “some” is important. This is a book told from the vantage point of Gary Cohn and General Jim Mattis rather than Jared Kushner or Mike Pence. It feels like a book heavily informed by Steven Bannon, Reince Priebus and John Dowd rather than Steven Miller, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or Mike Pompeo. This, in other words, is a report by some of the President’s men and it’s therefore unsurprising if, by the end, it feels like only a partial view.

On the whole, the result is surprisingly well balanced. It’s also probably as fair a view of Trump as it’s possible to have without dwelling too obsessively on his obvious flaws. Certainly, there are all the frustrations that we’ve come to hear about the Trump administration. There are the tantrums and the gratuitous lack of knowledge. Yet the moments when principals are calling him an “idiot” or a “moron” are relatively few. There’s very little that’s histrionic. The best parts are when the frustrations of the players are rooted in policy. The core of the book focuses on Trump’s attitude to trade, and the difficulty the globalists in his team — particularly Gary Cohn and Rob Porter — have in restraining him, especially over his instinctive urge to withdraw from the South Korean trade deal. The book is also compelling but less comprehensive around Trump’s lawyer, John Dowd, whose discussions with Robert Mueller are really the most illuminating we’ve had about the Special Counsel.

In those moments, Mueller says little but what he does say feels like a whole deal. Yet this isn’t a book for those looking to believe that Mueller has something. Woodward doesn’t cover any of the ground made their own by Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their essential Russian Roulette. He treads lightly around the question of Russia and isn’t afraid to highlight his longstanding doubts about Christopher Steele’s dossier which he describes as “garbage”. The conclusion Woodward seems to push through the Dowd thread is that Trump is “a fucking liar” but probably less than criminally so.

If Wolff’s book was sometimes hard to believe and Omarosa a little too vengeful to feel fair, Woodward goes a long way towards producing a detailed portrayal of the Trump White House. Trump here isn’t the same creature of strange Freudian psychology as found in some other accounts. Wolff was too heavily reliant on hearsay, his book riddled with inaccuracies, and was generally lucky in that he was the first to market. Omarosa had been closer to Trump but that gave her book a sharper edge that cut both ways, leaving her a very unreliable narrator. Woodward, however, portrays a man who is mercurial, often dangerously so, but also sometimes with a flair for disruptive thinking. As one analyst puts it: “The sort of wild card is the president’s short attention span and his questioning all these assumptions that people keep throwing out. And smelling and calling bullshit when he sees it”.

His supporters will hate it and his opponents will cherry-pick those parts of the book that portray the President at his worst. Between all that, however, is a book that strikes a measured tone. Trump can be kind in one moment and impulsive in the next. If Woodward is hard on him he is also hard on Obama, who is rarely spared criticism around Iran and North Korea. Woodward is particularly good when he gets into the policy disputes between the various factions at work inside the White House. He is excellent when revealing the degree to which Trump is manipulated by those around him. Steve Bannon, most surprisingly, comes out of it well when not pushing his America First agenda. Amid the chaos, he is the person most liable to compromise and with a better grounding in the realities of politics. Kushner and Ivanka, meanwhile, are remote and it’s hard to understand the place of these “New York Democrats” in a government increasingly steered towards the Right.

Woodward was previously accused of being too gentle with George W Bush and it might be argued that much here could have been sharper around Trump. But that’s to miss the point. The narrative is certainly shaped by those willing to speak to Woodward and perhaps it’s no surprise if most insight surrounds Cohn, Bannon, Dowd, and Porter’s stories. Woodward reports what he is able to report and consigns the rest to that place reserved for dossiers and the National Enquirer gossip (not one mention of Stormy Daniels in the entire book is notable, for example). That makes it admirable and about as compelling as these books can ever be without relying too heavily on the media-friendly sound-bites that surround their marketing. It might be too soon to say we’ve had the first great book about the Trump White House. We have, however, the first truly significant record.