A Book A Week

"He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the rails. We're in crazytown."

Much has been written about the 2016 presidential election. Scholars and political commentators have devoted many pages to their take on how Donald Trump was elected to the highest political office in the country. It seems like each week brings a new insight into the dysfunctional goings on in the White House. As members of Trump's administration either step down or are fired, they each are ready to publish their "tell-all" book with firsthand accounts of just how defective the American political system has become. With each new revelation that would be considered shocking in any other administration, the President simply brushes them off as "fake news."

Enter two time Pulitzer winning journalist Bob Woodward. Woodward is like the antithesis of fake news. He was one of the key journalists involved in exposing the Watergate scandal during Nixon's presidency and has provided authoritative reporting about every president since. In his newest book Fear: Trump in the White House, Woodward presents a startling portrait of the way Trump leads the country.

I'll start by saying that Fear presents little in the way of new revelations. Rather, Woodward provides a meticulously documented portrait that confirms the things we already know and fear about our President. Woodward confirms that Trump has a short attention span, is prone to knee-jerk/uninformed decisions, and simply denies any claims of facts that are counter to what he is trying to do. "You've got to be strong. You've got to be aggressive. You've got to push back hard. You've got to deny anything that's said about you. Never admit it."

The true marvel of Woodward's Fear is not in the contents of its pages (although much of what is reported is pretty terrifying for anyone who believes in the order of the US government) but in the way in which it is documented. Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury presented many of the same topics and retellings that Woodward's book does. Wolff's fatal flaw was that he did not document his sources. That simply doesn't work in Trump's era of fake news. Woodward remedies this by providing comprehensive footnotes and sources. Each quote or claim is backed by documented interviews, recordings, or press footage. Simply put, there is no denying that what Woodward has written is true. Fear, like the countless other books about Trump's White House, will likely do little to change the opinions of the President's supporters or detractors. It will, however, serve as verifiable historical documentation of the bizarre and downright insane reign of our current President.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.

(2018, 37)