The above title comes from a quote by Gary Cohn, Trump’s first Director of the National Economic Council and a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, in describing to presidential secretary Rob Porter his (Cohn’s) inclination to resign from the Oval Office. As described in Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, Cohn’s remark comes after the President made his fatal remarks about the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, when the president equated the victims with the neo-Nazi perpetrators: “There is blame on both sides…you also had people that were very fine people on both sides…” (246). As Woodward lays it out, this had Cohn threatening to resign right then, but he was persuaded by the president to remain and finish the crucial Republican tax bill. Cohn did remain, but the continuing chaos emanating from a president who never prepared or even read the briefing materials laboriously prepared by those like Cohn, had him disheartened. He conveys this to Rob Porter, Trump’s White House secretary:
“I don’t know how much longer I can stay. Things are just crazy here. They’re so chaotic. He’s never going to change. It’s pointless to prepare a meaningful, substantive briefing for the president that’s organized, where you have a bunch of slides. Because you know he’s never going to listen…He’s going to get through the first 10 minutes and then he’s going to want to start talking about some other topic” (271).
We then get a prime example of this when Trump, in an Oval Office meeting about the automobile industry, when he is shown Cohn-prepared charts proving that the auto industry was doing fine (though Detroit was producing 3.6 million fewer cars and light trucks since 1994, the rest of U.S. production, mostly in the Southeast, was up by the same 3.6 million). Unimpressed, the president insisted that the industry had to be fixed. Cohn then brought up the World Trade Organization document he’d put in Trump’s daily book, but which Trump clearly had not read: “The World Trade Organization is the worst organization ever created!” Trump said. “We lose more cases than anything.” Cohn then reiterated what was in the daily book, a document that showed that the United States “won 85.7 percent of its WTO cases, more than average.” Cohn added other wins at the WTO in disputes with China.
“This is bullshit,” Trump replied. “This is wrong.”
“This is not wrong. This is data from the US trade representative. Call Lighthizer…”
“I’m not calling Lighthizer.”
“Well,” Cohn said, “I’ll call Lighthizer. This is factual data. There’s no one that’s going to disagree with this data.” Then he added, “Data is data” (276-7).
But the president simply continued to argue against any data that did not fit his preconceptions and obsessions.
This pattern is repeated again and again in Woodward’s account. The president makes known his discontent, usually based on his obsessions, particularly his conviction that any arrangements with other countries should produce a profit for the United States. His shorthand for this was to usually blame generals or statesmen for not understanding ‘cost-benefit analysis.’ That was what should animate all deals, according to Trump: making money. When he saw agreements as costing the United States money—as in NATO, KORUS (the trade deal with South Korea), the WTO—then he wanted to trash the agreements and withdraw. For example, on August 25, 2017, the president decided he would make wide-ranging decisions concerning three ‘deals.’ “We’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” Trump said. “Just do it. Just do it. Get out of NAFTA. Get out of KORUS. And get out of the WTO. We’re withdrawing from all three” (264). Gary Kohn and General Kelly (now having replaced Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff) tried to explain how important the alliance with South Korea was in containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, how KORUS was actually cheap as national defense. Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, and H.R. McMaster, National Security adviser all agreed that withdrawing would be insane. Trump finally agreed to put off the 180-day letter announcing the withdrawals to a later time. But only days later, on September 5, Rob Porter entered the Oval Office to see in Trump’s hands a draft letter of the 180-day notice withdrawing from KORUS. Porter (normally the one who would write the letter) hadn’t written it, but someone (he guessed it was probably Peter Navarro or Wilbur Ross, usually the ones pushing Trump in this insane direction) had. It played right into Trump’s insecurity: “Until I actually take some action to demonstrate my threats are real and need to be taken seriously,” Trump said, “then we’re going to have less leverage in these things.” When Gary Cohn realized what had been done, however, he (Cohn) actually stole the letter from Trump’s desk and hid it in a folder marked “KEEP.” So central to the whole Trump presidency did Woodward see this incident that he makes it the opening prologue of his entire book. As Woodward describes it, Cohn told an associate, “I stole it off his desk. I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country” (xviii-xix). Cohn and Porter and many other principals knew this strategy would work because the president simply forgot anything that wasn’t directly in his face (If it was out of sight, it was out of mind…Trump’s memory needed a trigger—something on his desk or something he…saw on television (158). So the hope was that this insane impulse to scuttle some of the nation’s most important agreements would simply disappear into the memory hole. Woodward ends his Prologue and defines his theme with these words:
The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world (xxii).
What strikes this reader is not only the fleshing out of this hair-raising scenario (until, of course, several of his “staff” either resigned or were fired: Priebus, Tillerson and Cohn being the most important), but also the recurring assessments that many of these highly-placed leaders of Team Trump registered about their boss. Steve Bannon offers some of the juiciest assessments of the man he once called a “political genius.” When Bannon was prepping McMaster for his interview for the National Security job, for example, he told the general: ‘Don’t lecture Trump. He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals (he never went to class in college, never took a note (87). This same General McMaster said he believed that General Mattis and Rex Tillerson both had concluded the same thing: the president and the White House were crazy, so, as much as they could, they tried to implement foreign policy without him. After a particularly raucous meeting concerning the importance of world order and free trade, in which Trump publicly belittled his secretary of state, Gary Cohn asked Tillerson if he was ok. Tillerson’s now-famous reply: “He’s a fucking moron” (225). It was also at this point that one unnamed official summarized the meeting:
“It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views” (226).
Reince Priebus, Trump’s first Chief of Staff, offered his own summary of the president after he had been unceremoniously sacked by tweet (this after Trump had just assured him his announcement wouldn’t come until the weekend): “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way” (235). As to the operation of the White House, where the rules of access were routinely violated by certain privileged ones who simply walked into the Oval Office when they felt like it (Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, and Bannon), Priebus compared it to a 'team of predators,' where discussion is
“designed not to persuade, but, like their president, to win—to slay, crush and demean…If you have natural predators at the table,” Priebus said, “Things don’t move…Because 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. That’s what happens” (237).
There are many more of these assessments throughout Woodward’s book. Most underline the initial impression of a White House (where planet-impacting decisions are made almost hourly), in which Trump’s favorite mode was insulting his inferiors (“He’s a globalist. He’s not loyal to the president”—about Gary Cohn, whose wife Trump also blamed for Cohn’s upset about the remarks after Charlottesville), while they bit their tongues and commented afterward—“The president’s unhinged” said Kelly. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about” (263); “This is no longer a White House,” Porter said. “It’s just all-out war now” (252). Perhaps the most comprehensive assessment of the president came from Steve Bannon, Trump’s closest favorite in the early days, until he was fired. Here is how Woodward summarizes Bannon’s remarks:
Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary (299).
This comes very close to what Secretary of Defense Mattis said after the meeting in which Trump maintained that collective defense, as in NATO, was sucker play, and that he wanted to withdraw from all deals not of his own making. The president, Mattis said, acted like—and had the understanding of—“a fifth or sixth grader” (308).
In other words, friends, the mind of Donald Trump—the most powerful man in the world—is, according to those working most closely with him, the mind of a volatile, unread, emotionally unstable, desperately aggrieved and predatory teenager.
And that doesn’t even get to his character, his ethics or morals. For that, Woodward waits till the very end of his book, and puts the assessment into the mouth of the lawyer Trump chose to maintain his defense against the Mueller investigation. John Dowd joined Trump’s team of lawyers in May 2017. He had a reputation as one of the most successful defense lawyers of his time. He apparently believed that cooperating with Mueller would be the best strategy, and he did that for about a year. But he also believed that Mueller did not have a real case concerning Trump’s collusion with Russians, and therefore urged the president not to testify in person. He would take written questions and have Trump answer them with his lawyers’ help, but he would not allow the president to sit down for an interrogation with Mueller and his team. He believed that Mueller would “trick” the president into perjury. Trump, contrarily, believed that he had to agree to testify. Mainly, he believed he was superior to the lawyers who would question him. He was seconded in this position by his other lawyer, Ty Cobb, whom he urged to assert publicly that the president was ‘not afraid to testify.’ This was the nub of it for Trump: how he would look if he was seen to have ‘taken the fifth’ (i.e. taken refuge behind the Fifth Amendment’s stipulation that a person could not be forced to testify against himself). He was, after all, the president who had made a religion of the idea of toughness, of breaking down his opponents with threats, with fear. How could such a man’s man be afraid to testify to a bunch of bureaucrats? But Dowd was insistent, and when he couldn’t find the words, was in fact afraid to use the real words to convince the president that by testifying he would end up in jail, he resigned. And this is how Woodward ends his book, with a summary of John Dowd’s real reason for his insistence that the president not testify. It represents the book’s final assessment of Donald Trump, and succinctly and shockingly says it all:
But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, 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.” (357).
Lawrence DiStasi
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