Fear: Trump in the White House is a 2018 (non-fiction, unfortunately) book by Bob Woodward.
For those who don’t know (I feel like most people do, but just in case), Bob Woodward is a renowned journalist best known as part of the Washington Post team that investigated and reported on the Watergate break-ins in the 1970s. This eventually led to scandal, exposing President Richard Nixon as a corrupt, paranoid lunatic and forcing his subsequent resignation of the presidency. Every idealistic teenager who wants to be an investigative journalist wants to be Bob Woodward, and he’s one of the most trusted journalists in the United States.
So Woodward’s investigative efforts carry weight, which is why this book was so damning. The book itself is based on hundred of hours interviews with first hand sources (which Woodward recorded), copious meeting notes, etc…
The book delves into the experiences of the people around President Trump, including but not limited to his (former) personal lawyer John M. Dowd, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Chief of Staff John M. Kelly. Mattis and Kelly both deny passages about them but it seems unlikely Woodward would flat out lie about them.
This book came out before the midterm elections of Trump’s (first) term, and portrays the administration as chaotic and unprepared, led by a nutcase who was not suitable for the job but who wasn’t even capable of understanding how over his head he was.
I am pretty skeptical on many books based around current affairs, even by journalists as well respected as Woodward, because current affairs are often very nuanced and it’s hard to look at them objectively and gauge how accurate they are without historical hindsight.
That said, I struggle to find fault with this book, even though this book more or less confirms my view of Trump (I am/was not a Trump supporter). I am afraid of confirmation bias, but anybody who grew up on the New York area in the last 30-50 years knows exactly what kind of person Donald Trump is. Full disclosure: I am a 33 year old female from New York who grew up in the Westchester ‘burbs. My entire family on all sides came to the States in the early 1900s and has its roots in the Bronx. I’ve been exposed to Donald Trump for a large part of my life through local media, and my family has been hearing about him for the better part of half a century. The stories/descriptions of his words/actions in this book match previous patterns of things he’s said/done.
Watch what he does, not what he says. If you care to look, you will find stories dating back decades of how he’d hire contractors to do a job and not pay them, knowing they’d have to take the loss because they didn’t have the time or money for a long legal battle. He has a history of belittling employees and his “inferiors.” He shows up to major events unannounced and takes credit for things he had nothing to do with. He talks a big game and never backs it up. He is the worst breed of New Yorker. Every once and a while, he blunders his way into being right about something. The guy is and always has been a loud mouthed, narcissistic conman selling snake oil to the naïve. New Yorkers know this.
Plus, Woodward doesn’t just make shit up. He’s fair and he has a good track record of being critical and skeptical of all people in power, regardless of their political affiliation. I have trouble believing that he would suddenly become a sensationalist with an agenda to push out of dislike of Donald Trump. More likely, he’s observing the realizations of high ranking officials within the administration coming to terms with what at least two generations of New Yorkers who pay attention already know: Trump is not playing twelve dimensional chess, as his supporters and sycophants like to claim. He is in no way, shape, or form, fit to be President of the United States.
This book was disturbing but enjoyable, and the kind of high quality journalism we’ve come to expect from Bob Woodward. It’s a little dated at this point, but I think Woodward’s book will eventually be seen as a reliable record of an uncertain time in American history – a current events book at its best.
Category Archives: news
Fear: Trump in the White House
A Few Words on Anthony Bourdain
Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past few days, you probably know that Anthony Bourdain was found dead in a hotel room in France on Friday morning. He’d killed himself at 61.
I have been bummed about a lot of celebrity deaths.
But Bourdain’s death by suicide is different, and I find it as haunting as I did Robin Williams’s death in 2014. It probably doesn’t help that Bourdain, like Williams, was one of my favorite people that I never met. Carrie Fisher is another one. But Fisher didn’t actively kill herself, and that makes her death devastating, but different.
As with Williams’s death almost four years ago now, I never met the guy, but I feel like I lost a friend. My world is a little less complete, beating back the darkness is a little harder.
I also don’t have anything I can add to the discussion about suicide, the same way I didn’t have anything to add four years ago. I don’t have any ideas on ways to better the care for people with mental health struggles, and can offer no insightful point of view about the pain people with that level of depression are going through.
I listened to two of Bourdain’s books last year. I liked them both. I’ve been watching ‘Parts Unknown’ and his other shows on and off for years. Bourdain was an incredible storyteller. He went places with an open-mindedness that I envy, and wish I could summon (I can’t make myself want to go to China, for example). He made me want to go places (not China, obviously, but elsewhere, like South America). He was authentic and genuine, and he was smug about a lot of things, but never about the people he met or the cultures he was getting to know.
He showed me the world and its cultures through food and drink, and he was smart and funny and brave as he did it. He was self-aware, and self-deprecating, and ran circles around the establishment he exposed in terms of making the public want to experience new adventures, culinary and otherwise. He was empathetic and honest, and the most ironic thing about his death is that this was a guy who was showing us how to live. Be curious, seek travel and movement and other ways besides your own, and don’t be afraid of things that are different from what you know.
The most astonishing part about his death, to me, was how other people loved him as much as I did. Maybe it’s because when he was making headlines it was for the outrageous things he said and then everyone was condemning him instead of talking about how great he was, but I also think people embraced him more as time went on. I have seen certain commentaries from people that they have never seen people of color so affected by the death of a white man, and that is another testament to his storytelling: he didn’t just tell. He listened. It was as if the people in each story were the most important people in the world and he shared those stories with understanding and respect, without acting as if he was uncovering something. He was simply sharing it, not discovering it.
As I said, I have nothing real to add on the discussion of suicide and mental health, and I’m not someone who feels the need to add to the white noise by contributing nonsense. I don’t know what Bourdain was thinking, or how he was feeling, or what inside him was so dark that it could convince him to leave his daughter, who he seemed to love more than anyone (not surprising or unusual).
All I can say is this: Anthony Bourdain was colorful, and bright, and we need more people like him. He left an incredible legacy of learning about cultures and meeting people through travel and food and storytelling. I will miss him.
Finally, if you are thinking of taking your own life, or suspect someone you know is considering it, please call the national suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-8255. They can help.
“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird…”
BOOK NERDS! Surely you’ve heard by now that Harper Lee, author of beloved high school staple To Kill A Mockingbird, is publishing another book this summer?
WELL SHE IS.
This new novel, to be titled Go Set a Watchman, was the original manuscript she wrote prior to Mockingbird, but was scrapped when her editor told her to write the whole novel from young!Scout’s perspective, rather than adult!Scout’s perspective (which is when Watchman is set). Yes, Watchman is almost a sequel to Mockingbird, except it was actually written first, and it focuses on adult!Scout and her relationship with her aging father as well as the turmoil of race relations in the 1950s.
No, I have no idea what the title means! Am I still excited? YES!
There are some questions as to why Harper Lee decided to publish now – the main concern seeming to be that someone (her lawyer or agent or whoever) took advantage of her. Her lawyer supposedly found the manuscript going through Lee’s archives.
The New York Times wrote a more detailed piece on it here. The Times also put online their original review of To Kill A Mockingbird. You can take a look at that here.
This was one of the books that I loved in high school, early on. Before I quit listening to my English teachers (sophomore year) when I read books, books we read at school were hard to enjoy. My friends and I were always sad that we had to read all the plays of Oedipus but there was no Mockingbird follow up.
NOW THERE WILL BE! I can hardly wait for July, this is like when the new Harry Potter books used to come out!
Finally, from Buzzfeed.
words in scarlet ink 