Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, explained

The revelations of Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump at the White House, which was released on Tuesday, are troubling. The book describes the disruptive behavior of the President of the United States and says that many of his associates are actively working to counter what they view as his most destructive instructions.

But if the book contains a lot of new details never reported – Woodward reports that Trump wanted to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and considered sending a tweet, his worried collaborators could provoke a war with North Korea – sources that have spoken most to the Washington Post reporter, sources who have their own agendas.

It's hard to say Fear reads like Rob Porter, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, the story of Reince Priebus, Lindsey Graham and John Dowd on the Trump administration. Woodward does not explicitly identify these six people as sources, but provides pages and pages of their thoughts and motivations.

Then yes, Fear offers insight into a dysfunctional political process, with new details about President Trump screaming, delirious and bumping into assistants behind the scenes. But it also tells the particular story that Woodward's main sources have chosen to tell him and reflects their views and priorities.

Bob Woodward, from the Watergate scandal reporter to the US government columnist

Woodward became half of the Washington Post's "Woodward and Bernstein" reporting duo, who helped reveal the Nixon administration's Watergate camouflage, with the help of an anonymous source dubbed "Deep Throat." The scandal led to Nixon's resignation; he also made Woodward one of the country's most famous reporters.

Since then, Woodward's primary goal has not been to reveal deeply hidden scandals (it's hard to beat Watergate, after all). Instead, he used his fame and decades of relations in Washington to write and write books about what's happening at the highest level of the US government.

His past political books have covered the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve and several previous presidencies. The books have tried to put readers "in the room", describing what is going on behind closed doors in these institutions. To do this, Woodward relies on the cooperation and anonymous reports of senior government officials – who speak under the shield of their "deep experience".

Deep bottom, explained

An interview "in the background" is in the middle of the spectrum, ranging from the recording, where a reporter's source is identified, to the outside of the folder, where the source information can not be printed . In a background interview, the journalist agrees not to give the name of the source but may use his information and attribute it in one way or another, for example by saying that it is "a senior administration. "

"Deep bottom", however, is even vaguer than that. Essentially, Woodward can use the information he gets from his interviews – but he will not attribute it at all. Instead, he will simply write that it happened in God's voice style, without explaining where it came from. (The source notes at the end of Fear say that the information in each chapter "comes mainly from multiple in-depth interviews with first-hand sources".

The deep background serves many purposes. Stylistically, this allows for a more readable story – because, unlike traditional works, Woodward does not have to slow down to assign information to sources. The criticism here is that can also produce a misleading narrative that reads more authoritatively than it should.

The most noble motivation is that deep antecedents better protect identities from sources and allow them to speak more freely, masking information from where, and even the number of people who come from.

The flip side is, of course, that anonymous sources may feel more free to lie or mislead if they are protected from liability. The practice can also protect the journalist from some liability, as we do not know if a particular salacious anecdote comes from one or more sources.

In the so-called private thoughts of senior US government officials

Yet a somewhat paradoxical feature of how Woodward uses the deep background is that it is often very obvious who spoke to him.

This is because Woodward chooses to write, often at length, about the supposed "thoughts" and motivations of some government officials – but not others. Take, for example, the opening of Chapter 10 of Fear.

What is going on! Priebus reflects on a 9 February story The Washington Post reporting that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had discussed sanctions against Russia with the Russian ambassador before Trump was in power.

Later in the same chapter, telling a meeting with FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who asked to speak alone to Priebus, we have this:

What's that? thought Priebus. He only reminded McCabe because he had met her several weeks ago in the situation room …

… McCabe closed the door of Priebus's office. It's very strange, thought Priebus, who was standing near his desk.

The claim to be able to tell the private thoughts of senior government officials a few months later, based on an unknown source, is a long-standing, somewhat absurd stylistic tic of Woodward's books.

In some respects, however, this could be described as transparent. In writing these passages in this way, Woodward makes it extremely obvious that Priebus is the main source of these passages. Really, how could he know otherwise thoughts?

(Woodward gives a plausible denial to his sources by writing that information about "thoughts" can come from "the person," "a colleague with direct knowledge" or documents). the person doing the thinking.)

So, generally, when I read Woodward's books, I found it helpful to mentally replace any phrase like "Priebus thinking" with "Priebus thought, according to Priebus" . This is a useful reminder of this information – and probably other information that surrounds it – probably comes from it. It is equally telling to keep an eye on the thoughts that we are not aware of. For example, if you want to know what Jared Kushner "thought" about everything that happened to Fearyou are going to search in vain – because, it seems, he did not serve at Woodward.

Who were the sources of Woodward for Fear?

Another long-standing aspect of Woodward's books is that he has earned a reputation for representing people who have talked to him so much more positively than those who have not. And that certainly seems to be the case in Fear. (President Trump, note, did not interview Woodward.)

The specific question of how a lot people talked to Woodward is a bit of a red herring. This is because, often, when a reporter talks to someone, the source is not very useful – he mocks details, spends little time and does not want to divulge a lot of informal messages or not yet known

Conversely, some other people can be very helpful. They can take hours and hours to talk, helping Woodward determine dates and details, and offer tons of interesting or juicy information.

For Fearit seems that some people have done the same – because Woodward tells most of the book through the eyes of a few individuals, describing their thoughts and motivations at length. I would bet that each of these people spent a lot of time with Woodward:

• Rob Porter, secretary of the White House staff shot after his two ex-wives publicly accused of physically assaulting them
• Gary Cohn, Former Director of the Trump National Economic Council and Former President of Goldman Sachs
• Steve Bannon, former chief strategist of the White House (in my opinion, we have a description of Bannon's thoughts in 17 of the book's 42 chapters)
• Reince Priebus, Trump's first chief of staff at the White House
• Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina
• John Dowd, who was Trump's personal lawyer for the investigation in Russia until March

There are probably other sources that are a little better disguised – the search for documents on Defense Secretary James Mattis, for example, does not seem clear to me – but these are the most obvious ones. (You will notice that all the White House officials listed here have left their positions with Trump, which means that they have more free time to talk to Woodward and that they no longer run the risk of To be dismissed The other apparent source Graham is a fully elected.

At the same time, equally important officials who seem not to have spoken were mentioned less often, without any idea of ​​their thoughts or motives, and are often the subject of unflattering anecdotes. (I count three unflattering anecdotes about the treasure secretary Steve Mnuchin in the book.) That's what you risk if you make the choice not to talk to Woodward – your rivals will have unflattering leaks on you who will remain unanswered. tell their stories as long as yours remain unspeakable.

In Woodward's defense, it is rather difficult for him to explain things from Mnuchin's point of view if Mnuchin does not want to talk to him. However, the brutality of the contrast challenges some aspects of the project – and should remind us that what we read is only part of the story.

What's really in the book?

After a few chapters on the last months of the 2016 campaign and the transition, the book tells the first 13 months of Trump's presidency. The main focus is on internal administration events on a broad set of topics, mainly national security and economic policy. North Korea, trade, Afghanistan, Syria, the Mueller Inquiry, DACA, and the impact of Trump's comments in Charlottesville are among the most important topics.

The most important and worrying claims are probably Trump's foreign policy impulses:

• In February 2017, Woodward wrote, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, met with Graham and said he was "shaken" because "Trump was asking for a new war plan for a preemptive military strike on North Korea ". according to Graham, Dunford seemed "shaken by Trump's impulsive decision-making style".
• On April 4, 2017, after the Syrian regime was awarded a sarin gas attack against Syrian rebels, Trump phoned Defense Secretary Mattis and declared that he wanted to expel the Syrian president. Assad. "Let him kill him! Let's go. Let them kill, said Trump, according to Woodward. (He then writes that Mattis hung up and said to a senior staff member: "We will not do anything about it." The discussion resulted in an American strike.)
• In early 2018, after sending tweets to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, "Trump proposed to send a tweet stating that he was commanding all members of the US Army – thousands members of 28,500 soldiers – in South Korea, "Woodward writes. The previous month, National Security Adviser McMaster was warned that North Koreans would take such action "as a sign of imminent attack". (Finally, Trump did not send the tweet.)

Beyond the potential new wars, the closest unifying themes of the book are Trump's clashes with economic and foreign policy institutions, some of the frenzied attempts of his collaborators not to disrupt the world order, disdain and frustration of these aids have for the president (as revealed in the early excerpts).

But in reality, the book is less a thematic project than a compilation of accounts from major sources in Woodward. So we get:

• The last few months of the Trump campaign, mostly seen by Steve Bannon, in which he is described as staying true to Trump in his darkest hour, unlike others like Chris Christie
• Trade debates from the point of view of Gary Cohn and Rob Porter, describing them as fighting against the protectionists of the White House, struggling in vain to convince President Trump of his mistakes and stealing papers to prevent them from sign
• Debate on Afghan troops from Bannon's point of view, in which he is described as offering rare skepticism about sending additional troops
• Trump's private thought about North Korea, as perceived by warmonger Lindsey Graham, and sometimes Porter (although the book ends before Trump and Kim meet)
• How Trump's comments in Charlottesville affected Cohn and Porter
• Various other things that Trump and others said in Porter's presence (Trump insisting that his post-Charlottesville remarks were "the biggest mistake I made," said Trump, Jeff Sessions, "mentally retarded And John Sutherland). saying "the president is unbalanced")
• Reince Priebus's reaction to his own dismissal (he concludes that "the president has no psychological capacity to recognize empathy or pity in any way")
• John Dowd's disastrous attempts to prepare Trump for an interview with Mueller, his alleged belief that Trump is probably innocent, but he still can not be trusted to tell the truth to Mueller under oath, and his little revealing interactions with team of the special advisor.

There are however some curious omissions. The fiasco of the travel ban is one of the defining moments of the Trump administration, and I thought it would have been perfect for the Woodward treatment: a detailed and definitive narrative of what happened during those first chaotic days.

Instead, Woodward skips the travel ban, including only one reference after the fact. Was not he interested? Has not he received enough fresh material? Or was Steve Bannon much less interested in chronicling his role than talking to the Woodward audience about his skepticism of war in Afghanistan?

Should we trust the book?

Woodward is known for taking notes and meticulous interviews, while recording almost all of his interviews. I certainly expected everything in the book to be something told Woodward.

But with the way his books are written – and the contrast between the treatment of sources and sources – some grains of salt are definitely needed.

In my opinion, Woodward is at his best when he tells of contentious meetings, for which he has cajoled or intimidated several participants with different interests by giving them a version of what happened, and cross-checked what they have said against each other.

Things become less secure when we deal with memories of a source of things they have seen in private. Take the many stories in Trump's book by saying and doing controversial things in the presence of Rob Porter. I do not necessarily think Porter would lie about this, but it's necessarily more difficult to verify (unless he has documented it one way or another), and he certainly has reasons to to be upset by the Trump administration. And by telling his own behavior, he will certainly try to be seen.

The third person accounts of what the administration officials claim and their motives are the least reliable. At the very least, you must be fully aware that these accounts are likely to come from these officials themselves and it is obvious that they should not be taken literally. They are not necessarily too far from the boom.

In one way, Fear tells the Trump administration largely through the eyes of an accused spousal abuser, former president of Goldman Sachs, former head of Breitbart News, and former Trump lawyer.

So keep that in mind. But also keep in mind that they were in the room – and you were not.