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“A devastating reported account of the Trump Presidency that will be consulted as a first draft of the grim history it portrays…What Woodward has written is not just the story of a deeply flawed President but also, finally, an account of what those surrounding him have chosen to do about it.”
New Yorker
A Literary Hub Pick of the Ultimate Fall Books
A #1 iBooks bestseller
#1 New York Times bestseller
#1 USA Today bestseller
A #1 Audible.com bestseller
A Kirkus Reviews Pick of the Week
A #1 New York Times audio bestseller
A Publishers Weekly Pick of Best AudioBooks
An Audible.com “Best of the Year” Finalist in Politics
OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD
RUNAWAY #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
SENSATIONAL #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Explosive.”—The Washington Post
“Devastating.”—The New Yorker
“Unprecedented.”—CNN
“Great reporting...astute.”—Hugh Hewitt
THE INSIDE STORY ON PRESIDENT TRUMP, AS ONLY BOB WOODWARD CAN TELL IT
With authoritative reporting honed through nine presidencies, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies.
Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.
Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. Often with day-by-day details, dialogue and documentation, Fear tracks key foreign issues from North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, NATO, China and Russia. It reports in-depth on Trump’s key domestic issues particularly trade and tariff disputes, immigration, tax legislation, the Paris Climate Accord and the racial violence in Charlottesville in 2017.
Fear presents vivid details of the negotiations between Trump’s attorneys and Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, laying out for the first time the meeting-by-meeting discussions and strategies. It discloses how senior Trump White House officials joined together to steal draft orders from the president’s Oval Office desk so he would not issue directives that would jeopardize top secret intelligence operations.
“It was no less than an administrative coup d’état,” Woodward writes, “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”
For all its newsworthiness - and this is definitely a newsworthy book - the narrative itself is flat. I think this is partly intentional: Woodward is trying to keep himself out of the narrative. He follows a strict discipline of verifying his facts, and I trust his reporting, but there’s no narrative throughline: it’s a series of anecdotes strung together partly by chronology and partly by topic.
The narrator keeps to the same matter-of-fact tone.
It should be no surprise that Trump doesn’t come off well in the book. The worst insult he seems to have for someone is “you’re weak,” and he is obsessed with the idea of not appearing weak. “Never apologize,” he says. “It makes you look weak.” (Some people also think it makes you look thoughtful, self-aware, and mature, but that’s not the effect Trump is after.)
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