What a whirlwind this presidency has been. That is realized more than ever when you sit down and read about it word after word, page after page, all in a 400-page book. I reviewed Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House” in September of 2018. That book would go on to have Simon & Schuster’s bestselling opening week of all time, and was instantly the New York Times No.1 best seller. For the Washington Post, Bob Woodward has covered and written about 9 different Presidents, or 20% of all President’s this country has known. “Rage”, is Woodward’s second book about the Trump administration. So, let’s take a dive into what the book reveals.
Rage is a strong word. Likewise, it is a strong emotion. The title comes from a quote Trump gave Bob Woodward when he was still a presidential candidate in 2016. The quote reads “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.”. When you take a look at the current state of our country, I can think of no better word to describe national emotions than rage. I think President Trump, even in 2016, delivered an accurate quote, and Woodward accurately named this book as such.
While “Fear” focused mostly on campaign/White House logistics and the Russia Investigation in the first 13 months of the presidency, “Rage” in my opinion does a much better job of laying out multiple issues. I’m sure this is primarily due to the fact that this book covers a longer time period and more issues to cover occurred. But with that being said, I felt Fear was told too much through the eyes of disgruntled and fired Trump staff members. This book is classic Bob Woodward, with direct interviews he conducted himself with the President. It’s told through his eyes, with his journalistic touch. Overall, I thought Rage was much better written and entertaining than his first work on the Trump Administration.
While many issues are touched upon, two main issues dominated the most chapters in the book. That would be North Korea and the Coronavirus. More chapters are devoted to the Trump Administrations response to those two issues than any others.
The book commences by discussing several of President Trump’s senior cabinet level position appointees. It goes to show lots of evidence that appointees such as James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Rod Rosenstein, and Dan Coats where actually really good fits for their positions. He has assembled quite the team. Although, that would be short lived, as many of the beginning individuals (or nearly all of them), are no longer part of the administration.
The revolving door rotation of senior level cabinet positions was due to a multitude of reasons. Many of those reasons all had one central theme in common, communication. Either the lack of it, or the overabundance of it. Twitter. Twitter was a constant thorn in the side of the cabinet. Many of these folks were retired older Americans, and not social media users at all. They did not even know what Twitter was, much less how it operated. As we’ve come to know, the President uses Twitter every single day, sometimes tweeting or retweeting over 60 times a day. And not just trivial matters, but hiring’s, firings, and communication with foreign leaders and policy announcements. Many of the cabinet members had to find out very important pieces of information from Twitter, or be notified of the tweets hours later due to not having this form of social media. Some of these men were even
terminated via Twitter, with no prior knowledge that was going to occur. Failures to communicate in person, Twitter, and the old saying ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ led to many very qualified individuals no longer being part of the administration.
We learn from the book that the issues with North Korea were much bigger than much of the public realized. We were quite close to going to war with North Korea, and both sides were quite prepared for that possibility. in 2017 North Korea did a series of missile tests, launching them distances that would reach Hawaii, then Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast, and finally they tested a ICBM that would pretty much reach anywhere within the US. We were so concerned that a strike could happen at any time, that Secretary of Defense James Mattis had a light installed in his bathroom, that would flash so he would know a missile launch alert was incoming in case he was in the shower. He also had bells in his bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom that would ring for an alert. We had missile defense units in Alaska, California, and on ships in the ocean on high alert, and armed and ready to go at a moment’s notice ready to shoot down any incoming missiles.
The nuclear bomb that North Korea tested September 4th was estimated to be 17 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb. As 2018 started, and US sanctions crippled North Korea’s economy, Kim Jong Un was finally ready to negotiate. Kim and President Trump exchanged dozens of letters, many of which Bob Woodward was given declassified access too. The book highlights many of these, and it is fascinating to read. On June 12th, 2018 President Trump and Kim would meet at a summit in Singapore, thus being the first time, a sitting US President has met a North Korean head of state. A year later in June 2019, they would shake hands at the border between South Korea and North Korea, which eventually led to President Trump crossing the border into North Korea. Also becoming the first sitting President to have entered North Korea.
These would be historic international relations. Although relations would cool and the relationship became a bit soured, due to the fact that North Korea would not go as far as the Trump Administration required with denuclearization. We will have to wait and see if negotiations ever pick back up to where they once were.
As was mentioned, and to be expected, coronavirus dominated the seconded half of the book. Woodward does an adequate job of explaining what was, and is, a complex situation. COVID came onto the US’s radar on about January 1st, 2020. Although on a very minor scale. There were some news reports that it could be SARS, it was unconfirmed. But those reports are what peaked Rob Redfield, the Director of the CDC’s interest.
Redfield with the CDC and Fauci with the NIAID both began closely monitoring China. Feedback from China was that the virus was not a big deal, it was less deadly thank SARS, that every reported case was linked back to a wet market, and that they had it under control. Once we learned of human-to-human spread, and asymptomatic spread, things began to get much more serious. That was a game changer. The CDC activated 1,000’s of employees to begin working on this virus, and airports started doing screenings from China.
We had our first know positive case in late January. It was confirmed the person was a traveler from China, and that we shouldn’t be worried. The US continued offer China our CDC experts to visit the country, but were denied time and time again. We were no information, or inaccurate information from China. It wasn’t until late February that the World Health Organization was allowed into the country,
and with only one CDC expert as part of the team. Our official reported back that while there was a lot of disease there, China seemed to be doing everything that they could do, and extreme lock downs were in place. None of the officials were allowed into Wuhan. We later learned that over 5 million people left Wuhan before it was locked down, including through a major train/substation located very close to the wet market.
The CDC issued reports that human-to-human spread seemed relatively low, and both Fauci and Redfield confirmed this early on. Many of the presidential briefings by our health experts seemed to down play the issue. President Trump would then go on to make statements such as the virus would go away in 15 days, hot weather would kill it, and it would go away by a miracle. The shutdown of travel from China was a major important step early on. It was one of the first decisions that the administration made. Unfortunately, China had not restricted travel early enough, especially intra-China travel, and that to Europe. Therefore, it seemed that many of our cases were coming in from those who had traveled from China to Europe, and then to the United States.
Testing was also an early failure. Fewer than 500 tests had been conducted across the entire nation by early March. This, gabs in PPE and swabs, and the distribution of faulty tests early on made it extremely difficult to get a good picture of number of infections and how quickly the virus was spreading. Reading through these things in the book is quite compelling, especially since we are still reaping the effects of early decisions, misinformation, incorrect health expert assessments, and lacks in knowledge.
To sum up this synopsis, I found one particular paragraph of the book very telling. I feel an assessment I made in my Fear review two years still rings true with Rage. If you were a fan of President Trump before reading this book, you will still be a fan afterward. If you despised him before reading the book, you will also continue to do so. I do not believe this book will change any minds, and it isn’t a “tell-all”. At one point in the book, it described a nationwide focus group process conducted by President Trump’s campaign manager. The focus groups included 1,000 people. A question was asked reading “would you vote for someone you like but don’t agree with his policies, or would you vote for someone you don’t like but you like his policies?”. The results all across the nation were 1,000 to 0. All 1,000 people responded that they would vote for the person they didn’t like if they liked his policies. In my opinion, that’s politics in a nutshell.
I recommend picking up the book and giving it a read. It was well written, and easily digestible. Fear was worth the purchase from an entertainment perspective, Rage is worth the purchase because you might actually learn something or gain some further insight into the inner workings of the administration. I enjoyed Rage more than Fear. it will be another #1 New York Times best seller. Buy the book, and let me know what you think!