BOB WOODWARD’S FINAL WORDS FOR DONALD TRUMP SAYS IT ALL

 

                        …Bob Woodward has written 19 books about US politics

 

Trump seems to enjoy the fact that he brings out “rage” from his fellow Americans.

 

I just finished the latest book by Bob Woodward about our current president, Donald Trump.  The book’s title is “RAGE”.

I thought that Woodward’s previous book about Trump also had the strange name of, “FEAR”.  But this name of “RAGE” actually comes from the president himself.

Woodward said that Trump told him that: “He brings out rage in people.  He doesn't know whether that's a positive or a negative or a good thing or a bad thing. And also, it describes a condition in the country now. There's a lot of rage out there.”

Woodward at the end of the book talks about the fact that he has written a book about every president since and including Richard Nixon.  Every US president since 1970.  In the Epilogue of the book, in the first sentence he writes that the country was in turmoil and that as he finished writing his reporting for this book, he felt a deep feeling of weariness.  “The economy was in crisis with more than 40 million Americans out of work, and a powerful reckoning on racism and inequality was upon us.”

Trump had told him that there was “dynamite behind every door.”  But Woodward had learned from his presidential interviews that the real dynamite was Trump himself.

The problem was Trump’s failure to organize, his lack of discipline, his lack of trust in those that he had picked for his administration, his lack of trust in the experts & science and the undermining of so many American institutions that we rely on.

Most of all, was his failure to be a healing voice and the unwillingness to admit his errors, and to do the necessary homework….. and to just listen.

There were so many people that wanted him to become a real US president, but many came to realize that he had instead become an unstable threat to their own country.

That was all realized by Woodward when Trump had said, “His intelligence people need to go back to school, that the generals were stupid and the media was fake news.”

This had shaken any confidence in him and it was at a time when the country really needed a true leader.

Trump has talked and lied incessantly and he had weakened the microphone of the presidency, as well as its bully pulpit.  Too many people no longer trusted what he had to say.  Half of America seemed to be in that perpetual rage that he had referred to, but Trump seemed to enjoy that fact.

Woodward came to believe that almost anything could happen to the Trump presidency.  It could get better, or it could get much, much worse.

By the time he had finished the book, the virus, the economy, the internal political divisions had defined the president.  The intensity of those divisions is at its height.

The deep-seated hatred of American politics has flourished in the Trump years.  And Trump stoked it while not making any efforts to bring the country together, just to divide the people,   He began to dodge his role as the leader of the country despite his “I alone can fix it” rhetoric.

Woodward stated that, “Trump is a living paradox, capable of being friendly and appealing.  He can also be savage and his treatment of people is often almost unbelievable.”

His last sentence in the book says it all:

“When his performance as president is taken in its entirety, I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”

Copyright G. Ater  2020