Fear: Trump in the White House

Bob Woodward, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” Simon & Schuster, 2018, 357 pp.

Fear by Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, has had the fastest sales since Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman.’  I got my copy from the library; I was 144^th in line -- thankfully they have many copies so I only had to wait two months. Anyway, Woodward's book describes a dysfunctional White House where some of Trump's own aides think he is a danger to national security.  The only similar book that has sold as well as "Fear" this year is "Fire and Fury," which painted a similarly disturbing portrait of the president (another book I have read and posted).

My Notes:

Pg. xvii:  In early September 2017, in the eighth month of the Trump presidency, Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser found a one-page draft letter from the president addressed to the president of South Korea, terminating the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, known as KORUS.  This treaty is critical to the security of the US.  This all stemmed from Trump’s fury that the US had an $18 billion annual trade deficit with South Korea and was spending $3.5 billion a year to keep US troops there.  Cohn took the letter off the desk and filed it in a folder labeled ‘keep.’  In the anarchy and disorder of the White House, and Trump’s mind, the president never noticed the missing letter.

Pg. xxii:  It is a reality that the US 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 was the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.

Pg. 3:  Steve Bannon thought Trump was like Archie Bunker, but a really focused Archie Bunker.  During Trump’s campaign Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, had tried to navigate the campaign from the beginning.  When Trump called Mexicans ‘rapists’ in the speech announcing his candidacy on June 16, 2015, Priebus called him and said, ‘You can’t talk like that  We’ve been working really hard to win over Hispanics.’ About this time, McConnell, the majority leader, called Priebus and told him to: ‘Forget Trump, divert Republican money to us, the Senate candidates, and shut off the money faucet to Trump.’

Pg. 38:  At the Trump-Clinton debate, Bannon arranged to have four of the women who claimed the Clintons had attacked them present.  They were Paula Jones, who said Clinton had exposed himself to her and was paid 850,000 to keep quiet; Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed Clinton had raped her; Kathleen Willey, who alleged that Clinton sexually assaulted her in the White House; and Kathy Shelton, who, when she was 12, alleged that Hillary had smeared her while defending her client, who allegedly had raped Shelton.  Bannon’s original plan involved having the four women seated with Trump at a table and invite in reporters. The debate organizers barred the Clinton accusers from sitting in the VIP family box right in front of the stage as Bannon had planned, so they walked in last and sat in the front row of the audience.  Trump then announced that Kathy Shelton and Paula Jones were in the audience and said, ‘When Hillary…talks about words that I said 11 years ago, I think it’s disgraceful and I think she should be ashamed of herself.’

Pg. 57:  Tax Inversion:  Cohn stated that ‘the 35 percent corporate tax rate has been great for my business for the last decade.  We’ve been inverting companies to 10 percent tax jurisdictions and they pay us enormous fees’ He was speaking as a Goldman president.  An inversion refers to relocating a corporation’s legal home to a low-tax country such as Ireland or Bermuda in the form of a new parent company while retaining operations and management as a subsidiary in the higher-tax country.  Cohn bragged, ‘Where else can I take a company doing X in business that does X tomorrow and has 20 percent more earnings just by changing their corporate headquarters?”  He then went on to say that as he was now working for the White House, “We can’t allow that to continue.  We’ve got to get our corporate tax in line with the average, which is about 21, 22 percent.”  (Note: Forty-four percent of Americans pay no income tax. Pg. 293).

Pg. 80:  Obama had imposed sanctions on Russia on December 29, 2016, in retaliation for Russian meddling in the election.  He expelled 35 suspected Russian spies and ordered the closure of two Russian-owned compounds in Maryland and New York believed to be involved in espionage.  Surprisingly, the Russians did not retaliate as expected.  It turns out that General Flynn had illegally discussed these sanctions with the Russian ambassador before Trump was in office.

Pg. 123:  For years the CIA had run a 3,000 man top secret covert army in Afghanistan.  These were Afghans paid by the CIA.  (This is still in place).

Pg. 154:  “I want an executive order withdrawing the US from NAFTA and I want it on my desk by Friday,” President Trump ordered in April 2017.  There had been no studies or meetings on the issue.  The trade agreement has been the foundation of economic and national security in North America for more than two decades.  The agreement lifted tariffs between the US, Canada, and Mexico.  Annual trade among the three was more than $1 trillion.  US trade each with Canada and Mexico was almost as great as US trade with China.  Trump was finally convinced to slow down and not issue the 180 days required notice but just amp up the public rhetoric and threats.  Of course, he did withdraw from the Trans-Pacific-Partnership.

Pg. 181:  President Reagan in 1981 issued an executive order stating, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the US government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” But government lawyers had concluded that a military strike on a leader’s command-and-control headquarters during hostilities would not violate the assassination ban.

Pg. 185:  DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals):  In 2012 Obama had given 800,000 Dreamers protection from deportation and made work permits available to them, hoping to bring them out of the shadow economy and give them an American identity.

Pg. 186:  Chain Migration:  formally called the family reunification policy, allowed a single legal immigrant to bring close family members into the US—parents, children, a spouse and, in some cases, siblings.  These family members would have a path to legal permanent residency or citizenship.  Two-thirds of legal residents entered this way in 2016.

Pg. 201:  Gender reassignment surgery can be expensive but also is infrequent.  RAND estimated that of the 6,600 transgender troops, only a few hundred would seek this surgery at a cost of no more than $8 million per year.  In July 2017, the Freedom Caucus, a bloc of 30 strong conservatives in the House, threatened not to vote for the budget unless Trump instituted some prohibition on paying for gender reassignment surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender people serving in the military. 

Pg. 207:  Trump was pleased when Twitter announced the number of permissible characters in a single tweet was being doubled from 140 to 280.  Trump stated that he was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

Pg. 275:  Cohn showed Trump a Commerce Department study showing the US absolutely needed to trade with China.  “If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us, they could just stop sending us antibiotics.  You know we don’t really produce antibiotics in the US?”  China sold 96.6 percent of all antibiotics used in the US.  “We don’t even produce penicillin.” 

Pg. 286:  In a small group meeting in his office one day, Kelly said of the president ‘He’s an idiot.  It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails.  We’re in crazytown…”

Pg. 293:  During the 2012 presidential campaign, when 47 percent of the populace did not pay any income tax, it is now 44 percent, Mitt Romney was recorded saying, “There are 47 percent who are with Obama, who are dependent upon government, wo believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it—and that’s an entitlement.  And they will vote for this president no matter what…My job is not to worry about those people.  I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

While most of the 44 percent today that don’t pay federal taxes, they do pay taxes on their wages for Social Security and Medicare, as well as state, local, property and sales taxes.

Pg. 295:  The Trump income tax cut resulted in the individual income tax rates being pegged at 10, 12, 22, 24, 32, 35 and the top rate, 37 percent.  The tax-cut is estimated to add an estimated $1.5 trillion to the annual deficit over 10 years.

Pg. 231:  Trump liked to do things spur of the moment, to fly by the seat of his pants.  He acted like doing too much advance preparation would diminish his skill in improvising.  He did not want to be derailed by forethought.  As if a plan would take away his power, his sixth sense.

Pg. 236:  Months after his departure from the White House, Priebus made a final assessment.  He believed he had been surrounded in the West Wing by high-ranking natural killers with no requirement to produce regular work products—a plan, a speech, the outline of a strategy, a budget, a daily and weekly schedule.  They were roving interlopers, a band of chaos creators.