Fear and Quoting in Trump’s White House

Priebus was calling to alert Trump that the Pentagon had arrived at four options, which ranged from keeping the Obama status quo to banning transgender servicemembers, and told the president his team would walk him through each option in more detail once he arrived in the Oval Office.

“I’ll be down at 10,” Trump said. “Why don’t you guys come and see me then? We’ll figure it out.”

It’s not clear whether Trump was lying when he told his aides he’d discuss the issue with them later, changed his mind shortly thereafter, or simply forgot that he had promised to continue the conversation. But between 8:55 and 9:08 a.m., the president announced the policy change—in a series of tweets: “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow . . . [t]ransgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming . . . victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

Later that day, according to veteran Washington journalist Bob Woodward in his new book on the Trump White House, the president asked Priebus what he thought of the tweets.

“I think it would’ve been better if we had a decision memo, looped Mattis in,” Priebus responded. That was putting it gently. The tweets apparently infuriated a vacationing James Mattis, the defense secretary, and frustrated the rest of the Pentagon bureaucracy, some members of which told a clamoring press that Trump’s announcement was “new guidance.” There was no warning, no preparation, no media strategy. Trump had made his decision. His message to the rest of the administration trying to pick up the pieces? You’ll figure it out.

Woodward has perhaps a hundred examples of Trump’s, well, unusual approach to management. My personal favorite occurred during the post-election transition, when, in a Trump Tower meeting with Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, Trump was so wowed he complained out loud that he should have hired Cohn to be the treasury secretary. Trump’s unannounced pick for that job, Steven Mnuchin, was sitting right there. Before Cohn had left the building, Woodward writes, the news of Mnuchin’s selection for Treasury was being reported on TV. Mnuchin, apparently worried that the president might act on his remark and actually retract the promised nomination, decided to box him in by leaking it to the press. “Mnuchin just put that out,” Jared Kushner told Cohn.

Trump actively despises formal processes and looks for ways to circumvent them. He regularly misleads—whether consciously or not is unclear—his staff and advisers about his intentions. He focuses on how others, particularly the news media, react to him rather than on how his words and actions might affect the people who work for him and are trying to implement his agenda.

The impression Woodward has taken from his interviews with aides, staffers, and others around the president is that he is either very stupid or a compulsive liar—or perhaps both. The book’s title, Fear, is explained in the epigraph, a quotation from Trump in a March 2016 interview with Woodward: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.” A better title for the book, unpublishable though it is, might have been F—ing Liar. That’s the sentiment Woodward attributes to Trump lawyer John Dowd, who in the final pages struggles to convince Trump that he cannot submit to questioning by special counsel Robert Mueller. The book ends with Woodward quoting Dowd, having resigned from Trump’s legal team, expressing what he could not say directly to the president: “You’re a f—ing liar.”

Dowd and others named as figures contributing to the book’s unflattering portrayal of Trump have been suggesting that Woodward himself is a f—ing liar since the first excerpts of Fear appeared in the press a week before the book’s official publication. Individual events, quotations, and moments Woodward reports are “completely false” (says Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow), “exactly the opposite” of true (says current chief of staff John Kelly), “fabricated stories” (says press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders), and “the product of someone’s rich imagination” (says defense secretary Mattis).

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The denials were as predictable as Woodward’s “note to readers” at the beginning of the book, in which he claims he conducted interviews on “deep background” with sources who were “firsthand participants and witnesses” to the events. From this he produces vivid scenes that include direct quotations from the participants, all rendered in his signature neutral, fly-on-the-wall narrative style. Woodward knows the state of mind of figures as they discuss interest rates or North Korean missile capabilities. One official “watched in admiration” as a colleague handled a confrontation with Trump deftly. The blocking and positioning of people in scenes is described with script-like detail. Ivanka is sitting on a couch, John Kelly standing behind a chair, Gary Cohn halfway through the door of the Oval Office. Chris Christie, during a low point of the 2016 campaign following the Access Hollywood tape, says something “with a note of finality”—whatever that means. Oh, and Christie, we learn, is wearing “sweatpants and a ball cap.” The dialogue flows smoothly. The drama builds perfectly.

Too smoothly, too perfectly? Perhaps. One problem with the Woodward approach is that he blurs the lines between what’s verifiably true and what is reconstructed from the recollections of his sources. Notes from a White House official taken just after a conversation are more reliable than an interview with that same official about the same conversation days or weeks later. The accuracy of a scene in the Oval Office is vastly improved if Woodward has four sources in the room instead of just one—especially if the four sources agree on the nature of the description. But readers are given no guidance on how solidly sourced each detail is.

Some of the interviewees benefit from l’esprit de l’escalier—they always have the perfectly crafted retort, while their opponents sound foolish or say nothing at all. One of the book’s most dramatic scenes comes six months into Trump’s presidency. The administration’s cabal of globalists—Mattis, Cohn, Rex Tillerson—spirited Trump away from the comforts of the West Wing and into the Tank, the impressive conference room in the Pentagon where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet. The change of setting might have allowed them to impress upon Trump the seriousness of addressing what was already emerging as the “Big Problem”: “The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.” During the meeting, each of Trump’s advisers walked the president through the merits of the “rules-based, international democratic order”: alliances, NATO, free trade. With every pitch, Woodward lets you see Trump’s crossed arms get tighter, his brow get furroweder.

During the Tank meeting, the anti-globalist Steve Bannon was sitting in the back of the room. He serves as a kind of Greek chorus for Woodward’s account of the meeting, injecting his own disapproval and identifying how the whole effort is only hardening Trump’s views. Finally, some time during Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin’s turn, Bannon-as-truth-telling-hero steps into the scene, supposedly after getting a subtle nod from Trump himself to get involved.

What was the substance of Mnuchin’s attempt to answer? Did he have a sound argument? Woodward, clearly relying on Bannon’s account, never lets us judge.

Woodward doesn’t come across as partial to one particular side of the many splits within Trump World. He lets not only Bannon but several others—Cohn, Dowd, staff secretary Rob Porter, Senator Lindsey Graham—have turns at driving his narrative. Unsurprisingly, several of his likely sources end up looking suspiciously like heroes—although some of what he describes isn’t as heroic as his subjects seem to think it is.

Cohn and Porter, allies on the issue of trade against the protectionists encouraging Trump’s pro-tariff instincts, regularly interfered in the president’s reckless trade actions. Woodward reports that Cohn stole bad trade declarations off the Resolute desk before Trump could sign them and that Porter put memos intended for Trump from his top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, into a file in his desk, never to be seen by the president. For the sake of saving the global trade order, American hegemony, and even Trump’s own political position, Cohn and Porter’s subterfuge is defensible and commendable. But is it honorable to lie to the president? Is it in keeping with your oath of office? Is it heroic to unload your story to a journalist?

But back to the question of whether all, some, or any of it is actually true. Even with the questionable writing style and obscured sourcing, the trouble with claiming Woodward’s book is a “scam,” as President Trump has called it, is that its depiction of the commander in chief is consistent with much of what those of us who cover the White House and the president have seen and heard every day since he descended the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015. There is nothing new in the implied conclusions of the book: Trump is erratic, impetuous, ignorant of basic facts, unfocused, forgetful, mercurial, cruel to his subordinates, bored by details, self-absorbed, obsessed with TV. Sure, it’s possible that Woodward manipulated hours and hours of interviews and reporting to produce a book that would conform to and confirm this widely accepted characterization. But it’s also possible that the man we see at rallies, in televised interviews, and on Twitter is exactly who he is behind the scenes and that his aides and advisers are even more alarmed than the majority of Americans. This is the premise of Fear; readers either will accept it or they won’t.

As Woodward has defended the book against accusations that it is false or unfair, he has challenged the subjects of his book to refute specifics. The denials from current and former White House and administration officials have been broad and general, not narrow and focused. No administration officials have yet emerged to say they weren’t in a meeting that Woodward said they were. A few, like Mattis and Kelly, have denied making the insulting comments about Trump that the book attributes to them. Woodward says the two Marine generals are “not telling the truth.”

After reading Fear, I asked one former White House official who is mentioned in the book whether an incident in which he was depicted as being involved was described accurately. The official did not confirm or deny anything and instead requested to speak about it off the record. If Woodward’s account is inaccurate and the people he identifies care about their credibility, they ought to speak up.