Here, for example, is Trump flying to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at Panmunjom: “It was pea soup outside. In “Rage,” he serves up heaps of that inimitable Woodward prose. She probably meant to say that Woodward’s writing has the mouthfeel of gravel. Someone like Jill Abramson, the former New York Times executive editor who praised the fearsomely unreadable “Fear” in the Washington Post for its “flat, reportorial tone.” Usually, a review like this is assigned to the kind of Acela jockey who runs into Woodward frequently enough to refrain from making things awkward. No, this is the summit, the last line on the last page, the empyrean heights to which those dozen-and-a-half interviews have led.īooks Bolton book tells all about Trump - except what makes him tickįormer national security advisor John Bolton skewers President Trump and White House insiders in ‘The Room Where it Happened.’ This is not the first sentence of the book, the base camp from which higher-order truths are scaled. “Trump is the wrong man for the job,” Woodward writes. And you imagine the stenographer of that rage rendering it with a clarifying fury of his own. So what profound insight did those conversations yield? With a title like “Rage,” you imagine King Lear-like diatribes against the Dems, or some Trumpian version of Nixon talking to the portraits, third martini spilling on the West Wing carpet. Woodward is the town cardiologist, or at least carries himself as such. He has shared in two Pulitzers and written 21 books, virtually all of them about how power courses through Washington’s veins. We’ve now got enough crises to keep Beltway authors busy for a generation, though most of them will not be lucky enough to speak to the president 18 times, because they are not Bob Woodward, who - with his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein - helped pave the way for Richard Nixon’s downfall. Then Woodward quotes himself again, from a television appearance made while promoting “Fear”: “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.” His first was called “ Fear.” If you happen to have forgotten about “Fear,” Woodward offers a reminder on of “Rage,” quoting from the earlier volume’s description of Trump as “mercurial” and “unpredictable.” Both words mean the same thing, but let’s leave that aside for now. These interviews form the spine of “ Rage,” Woodward’s second book about the Trump administration.

Eighteen! Do you think Trump has spoken to his Energy secretary 18 times? Do you even know who his Energy secretary is? I can tell you this much he is not Bob Woodward, the man on the other end of the line for all those conversations, some of them on tape, many conducted in the midst of a pandemic. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Woodward fear