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    MW
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    Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency

    Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency


    President Trump and Bob Woodward discuss Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” before its publication. (The Washington Post)


    By Philip Rucker and

    Robert Costa

    September 4 at 11:08 AM


    John Dowd was convinced that President Trump would commit perjury if he talked to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. So, on Jan. 27, the president’s then-personal attorney staged a practice session to try to make his point.

    In the White House residence, Dowd peppered Trump with questions about the Russia investigation, provoking stumbles, contradictions and lies until the president eventually lost his cool.

    “This thing’s a goddamn hoax,” Trump erupted at the start of a 30-minute rant that finished with him saying, “I don’t really want to testify.”

    The dramatic and previously untold scene is recounted in “Fear,” a forthcoming book by Bob Woodward that paints a harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency, based on in-depth interviews with administration officials and other principals.

    Woodward writes that his book is drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand participants and witnesses that were conducted on “deep background,” meaning the information could be used but he would not reveal who provided it. His account is also drawn from meeting notes, personal diaries and government documents.

    Woodward depicts Trump’s anger and paranoia about the Russia inquiry as unrelenting, at times paralyzing the West Wing for entire days. Learning of the appointment of Mueller in May 2017, Trump groused, “Everybody’s trying to get me”— part of a venting period that shellshocked aides compared to Richard Nixon’s final days as president.

    The 448-page book was obtained by The Washington Post. Woodward, an associate editor at The Post, sought an interview with Trump through several intermediaries to no avail. The president called Woodward in early August, after the manuscript had been completed, to say he wanted to participate. The president complained that it would be a “bad book,” according to an audio recording of the conversation. Woodward replied that his work would be “tough” but factual and based on his reporting.

    [Exclusive audio: Phone call between President Trump and Bob Woodward]

    The book’s title is derived from a remark that then-candidate Trump made in an interview with Woodward and Post political reporter Robert Costa in 2016. Trump said, “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, ‘Fear.’ ”

    A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.

    Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.

    Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.

    At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all.

    “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.

    After Trump left the meeting, Woodward recounts, “Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’ ”

    In Woodward’s telling, many top advisers were repeatedly unnerved by Trump’s actions and expressed dim views of him. “Secretaries of defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for,” Mattis told friends at one point, prompting laughter as he explained Trump’s tendency to go off on tangents about subjects such as immigration and the news media.

    Inside the White House, Woodward portrays an unsteady executive detached from the conventions of governing and prone to snapping at high-ranking staff members, whom he unsettled and belittled on a daily basis.


    Chief of Staff John F. Kelly in the Oval Office in February. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

    White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was “unhinged,” Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
    Reince Priebus, Kelly’s predecessor, fretted that he could do little to constrain Trump from sparking chaos. Woodward writes that Priebus dubbed the presidential bedroom, where Trump obsessively watched cable news and tweeted, “the devil’s workshop” and said early mornings and Sunday evenings, when the president often set off tweetstorms, were “the witching hour.”

    Trump apparently had little regard for Priebus. He once instructed then-staff secretary Rob Porter to ignore Priebus, even though Porter reported to the chief of staff, saying that Priebus was “‘like a little rat. He just scurries around.’ ”

    Few in Trump’s orbit were protected from the president’s insults. He often mocked then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster behind his back, puffing up his chest and exaggerating his breathing as he impersonated the retired Army general, and once said McMaster dresses in cheap suits, “like a beer salesman.”

    Trump told Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a wealthy investor eight years his senior: “I don’t trust you. I don’t want you doing any more negotiations. . . . You’re past your prime.”


    Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the White House in March. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

    A near-constant subject of withering presidential attacks was Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump told Porter that Sessions was a “traitor” for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, Woodward writes. Mocking Sessions’s accent, Trump added: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner. . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

    At a dinner with Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, Trump lashed out at a vocal critic, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He painted the former Navy pilot as cowardly, falsely suggesting he took an early release from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of his father’s military rank and left others behind.

    Mattis swiftly corrected his boss: “No, Mr. President, I think you’ve got it reversed.” The defense secretary explained that McCain, who died Aug. 25, had in fact turned down early release and was brutally tortured during his five years at the “Hanoi Hilton.”

    “Oh, okay,” Trump replied, according to Woodward’s account.

    With Trump’s rage and defiance impossible to contain, Cabinet members and other senior officials learned to act discreetly. Woodward describes an alliance among Trump’s traditionalists — including Mattis and Gary Cohn, the president’s former top economic adviser — to stymie what they considered dangerous acts.

    “It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually,” Porter is quoted as saying. “Other times, we would fall over the edge, and an action would be taken.”

    After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s ****ing kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the ****ing lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

    Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.


    Then-White House chief economic adviser Gary Cohn in September 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

    Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

    Cohn made a similar play to prevent Trump from pulling the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, something the president has long threatened to do. In spring 2017, Trump was eager to withdraw from NAFTA and told Porter: “Why aren’t we getting this done? Do your job. It’s tap, tap, tap. You’re just tapping me along. I want to do this.”

    Under orders from the president, Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

    Despite repeated threats by Trump, the United States has remained in both pacts. The administration continues to negotiate new terms with South Korea as well as with its NAFTA partners, Canada and Mexico.

    Cohn came to regard the president as “a professional liar” and threatened to resign in August 2017 over Trump’s handling of a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Cohn, who is Jewish, was especially shaken when one of his daughters found a swastika on her college dorm room.

    Trump was sharply criticized for initially saying that “both sides” were to blame. At the urging of advisers, he then condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis but almost immediately told aides, “That was the biggest ****ing mistake I’ve made” and the “worst speech I’ve ever given,” according to Woodward’s account.

    When Cohn met with Trump to deliver his resignation letter after Charlottesville, the president told him, “This is treason,” and persuaded his economic adviser to stay on. Kelly then confided to Cohn that he shared Cohn’s horror at Trump’s handling of the tragedy — and shared Cohn’s fury with Trump.

    “I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times,” Kelly told Cohn, according to Woodward. Kelly himself has threatened to quit several times but has not done so.

    Woodward illustrates how the dread in Trump’s orbit became all-encompassing over the course of Trump’s first year in office, leaving some staff members and Cabinet members confounded by the president’s lack of understanding about how government functions and his inability and unwillingness to learn.

    At one point, Porter, who departed in February amid domestic abuse allegations, is quoted as saying, “This was no longer a presidency. This is no longer a White House. This is a man being who he is.”

    Such moments of panic are a routine feature but not the thrust of Woodward’s book, which mostly focuses on substantive decisions and internal disagreements, including tensions with North Korea as well as the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

    Woodward recounts repeated episodes of anxiety inside the government over Trump’s handling of the North Korean nuclear threat. One month into his presidency, Trump asked Dunford for a plan for a preemptive military strike on North Korea, which rattled the combat veteran.

    In the fall of 2017, as Trump intensified a war of words with Kim Jong Un, nicknaming North Korea’s dictator “Little Rocket Man” in a speech at the United Nations, aides worried the president might be provoking Kim. But, Woodward writes, Trump told Porter that he saw the situation as a contest of wills: “This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim.”

    The book also details Trump’s impatience with the war in Afghanistan, which had become the United States’ longest conflict. At a July 2017 National Security Council meeting, Trump dressed down his generals and other advisers for 25 minutes, complaining that the United States was losing, according to Woodward.

    “The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you,” Trump told them. “They could do a much better job. I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” He went on to ask: “How many more deaths? How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?”

    The president’s family members, while sometimes touted as his key advisers by other Trump chroniclers, are minor players in Woodward’s account, popping up occasionally in the West Wing and vexing adversaries.


    Ivanka Trump and her husband, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in March. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)


    White House senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon, second from left, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, right, in 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)


    Woodward recounts an expletive-laden altercation between Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, then the chief White House strategist.

    “You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon screamed at her, telling her that she had to work through Priebus like other aides. “You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!”

    Ivanka Trump, who had special access to the president and worked around Priebus, replied: “I’m not a staffer! I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.”

    Such tensions boiled among many of Trump’s core advisers. Priebus is quoted as describing Trump officials not as rivals but as “natural predators.”

    “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody,” Priebus says.

    Hovering over the White House was Mueller’s inquiry, which deeply embarrassed the president. Woodward describes Trump calling his Egyptian counterpart to secure the release of an imprisoned charity worker and President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi saying: “Donald, I’m worried about this investigation. Are you going to be around?”

    Trump relayed the conversation to Dowd and said it was “like a kick in the nuts,” according to Woodward.

    The book vividly recounts the ongoing debate between Trump and his attorneys about whether the president would sit for an interview with Mueller. On March 5, Dowd and Trump attorney Jay Sekulow met in Mueller’s office with the special counsel and his deputy, James Quarles, where Dowd and Sekulow reenacted Trump’s January practice session.


    Woodward’s book recounts the debate between Trump and his lawyers, including John Dowd, regarding whether the president will sit for an interview with special counsel Robert. S. Mueller III. (Richard Drew/AP)

    Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”
    “John, I understand,” Mueller replied, according to Woodward.

    Later that month, Dowd told Trump: “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

    But Trump, concerned about the optics of a president refusing to testify and convinced that he could handle Mueller’s questions, had by then decided otherwise.

    “I’ll be a real good witness,” Trump told Dowd, according to Woodward.
    “You are not a good witness,” Dowd replied. “Mr. President, I’m afraid I just can’t help you.”

    The next morning, Dowd resigned.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.0c5691e79287

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    Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency
    "Reveals"? It seems that one person after another that Woodward has attributed his revelations to claims he is lying! I'm sick and tired of these people getting rich writing books of lies. We get all the lies we need from the nightly news!

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    MW
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    Quote Originally Posted by jtdc View Post
    "Reveals"? It seems that one person after another that Woodward has attributed his revelations to claims he is lying! I'm sick and tired of these people getting rich writing books of lies. We get all the lies we need from the nightly news!
    Of course they're going to claim he's lying. That's to be expected in an employee/employer relationship. It's called job preservation.

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    Southern Republican senators reject Trump’s criticism of Sessions


    By Gabriel Pogrund

    September 4 at 11:12 PM

    Southern Republican senators defended Jeff Sessions after an explosive new book by Bob Woodward recounted how President Trump called his attorney general a “dumb Southerner” and mocked his accent.

    In the forthcoming chronicle of Trump’s White House, “Fear,” Woodward writes that the president privately called Sessions a “traitor,” saying: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”

    The remarks are said to have come during a conversation between Trump and his former staff secretary, Rob Porter, about Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation. They represent the most withering insults the president has directed at his attorney general in months of largely one-sided sniping.

    In a message on Twitter Tuesday night, Trump denied making the remarks.
    “The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘a dumb southerner.’ I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He made this up to divide!” the president said.

    Republican lawmakers are typically cautious in their criticism of Trump’s latest remarks, but on Tuesday several senators who said they had not read the book still bristled at the president’s alleged slight.

    “I’m a Southerner, people can judge my intellect, my IQ, by my product and what I produce rather than what somebody else says,” Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said in an interview.

    “We’re a pretty smart bunch. We lost the Civil War, but I think we’re winning the economic war since then . . . I’m not gonna get into name calling because I don’t think you should be allowed to call names — including the president,” he added.

    Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who served alongside Sessions during his 20 years as senator for Alabama, said: “Well, I’m sure I’ve got that accent, wouldn’t you think?”

    He pointed out that Trump himself relied on Southern voters during the 2016 general election, warning: “I guess the president, he says what he thinks . . . I think the president’s probably got a lot of respect for the South, I hope so. He did well there. Without the South he wouldn’t be the president of the United States.”

    The vast majority of Southern states voted for Trump.

    Asked what he thought of Trump’s claim that Sessions was “mentally retarded,” Shelby, the fifth most senior Republican senator, added: “I think that’s strong words. I think Sessions is a very smart man and a man of integrity. I would disagree with the president on that.”

    Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) added to the chorus of disapproval, joking that Sessions was not a “dumb Southerner” but a “smart Southerner.” “Oh come on,” he said. “I’m a Southerner, too. I think it’s not at all appropriate. It’s totally inappropriate.”

    Sen. Thom Tillis (R- N.C.), who grew up in New Orleans and Nashville among other cities, also raised his Southern origins, saying: “As a Southerner, I have to say, Jeff Sessions . . . is bright, studied in the law and well-respected universally by the conference here, I think that speaks for itself. He is bright.”
    The comments come a week after it was revealed that Trump last month privately revived the prospect of firing Sessions, with whom he has clashed on issues including the Russia investigation and presidential interference in the judiciary.

    Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber have at the same time softened their rhetoric on Sessions, with some openly accepting he will now be replaced but urging him to stay on until the midterm elections.

    Said Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday: “I think we all know it’s likely he is going to terminate him after the midterms. In the interim I think it would be good if he stopped raving about Sessions. It’s unbecoming. Either do something or don’t, but these comments just continue to degrade our nation.”
    “He doesn’t have healthy respect for the democratic institutions we have here. I was down in Venezuela back in May and the characteristics are definitely the characteristics you get out there, where you award your friends and criminalize your enemies,” said Corker, who is retiring at the end of his term.

    Asked whether he thought Sessions could last until the midterms, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) told The Washington Post: “I don’t know. It’s not my call, it’s the president’s.”

    On Monday, Trump intensified his criticism of Sessions, blaming him for bringing politically inconvenient indictments against two Republican lawmakers: Reps. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) and Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who were, respectively, the first and second Republicans in Congress to endorse Trump. Sessions was the third. “The Democrats, none of whom voted for Jeff Sessions, must love him now,” Trump tweeted.

    https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2018/09/southern-gop-senators-reject-trumps-criticism-sessions/

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    Quote Originally Posted by MW View Post
    Of course they're going to claim he's lying.
    Is that your endorsement that what Woodward writes is fact?

    When Woodward and Bernstein got information from Deepthroat, they did not publish that as fact, it was a starting point for them to investigate. What they did publish was the documented facts that they found as a result of the direction Deepthroat pointed them in.

    Today, news media, even Woodward himself, publish unsubstantiated rumors and claim them as fact. "Anonymous sources" has become the new standard. Instead of the obligation being on the accuser to prove an allegation to be true, it is now on the accused to prove that a rumor is not true. I think that should be considered libelous! In this case, if Woodard cannot provide proof that what he claims is fact, the book should be banned and recalled, and Woodward should be open to lawsuits. We should not encourage lies.


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    From MW's post:
    In the forthcoming chronicle of Trump’s White House, “Fear,” Woodward writes that the president privately called Sessions a “traitor,” saying: “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner . . . He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”
    In all of the following text, there is not one person verifying that President Trump spoke those words. All of the quotes are people defending against a rumor! I accept the likelihood that he may have said such words, but there is a difference between what is public and what is private. We all need some private moments where we are not held liable for every word we speak!

    So to me, this article is just more left-wing promotion of a lie!

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