I was travelling,
camping, talking with people across the Canada, when Woodward’s
book came out in August of this year. Every bookstore I visited was
sold out of the book. “It’s freaky,” said the bookseller in
Owen Sound, “We sold out the first day.”
There was great
interest, due to Woodward’s
reputation as a truthful, informed and
courageous reporter. He uses a tape recorder, and has “access.”
But what I was
looking for even more than the reporting and quotes was his insight
into Trump himself. He uses a March 31, 2016, quote from Trump at
the beginning of the book just before the Note to Readers:
“Real power is – I don’t even want to use the word – fear.”
He draws his title
from it and uses it a couple times later in the book, but does not
seem, to my eyes, to develop much of that insight into Trump. Perhaps
in his wisdom he just assumes that ordinary people like me will be
able to see from all the reporting in the book that Trump works and
plays with fears.
But where I could
really see what he thought was in the last paragraph of the last page
of the book, where he writes of John Dowd’s resignation as Trump’s
lawyer. Dowd, very experienced and astute, supports and likes Trump
and was aware of his limitations, resigned because Trump would not
take his advice.
Woodward’s last
paragraph reads:
But in the man and the presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In
the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the
tweetings, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation,
Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring
himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
It’s not clear to
me that this fatal flaw directly relates to the”Fear” of the
tile, but it may. Woodward reports two pages earlier Dowd as saying
something that gets a little closer to the fear idea. He is telling Trump
that he doesn’t have to worry about being impeached and says:
They’re not going to impeach you. Are you shitting me? They’re a
bunch of cowards, the whole town. The media, the Congress. They’re
gutless.
So perhaps that was
the fear that Woodward was referencing – the fear, the true
cowardice, within not just Washington but the US public itself.
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