Son in law Jared Kushner, described as yin to Trump's yang, said of Trump that 'controversy elevates the message.' Woodward suggested Bill Gates lead Covid response. My fave was Lindsey Graham who tried steering Trump to productive directions. Featured is Trump's call with Chinese counterpart who denied visas to US health experts, after which Trump messaged corona virus not real concern, looking weak and more concerned about the hotel business.

'Rage’ tells how Covid was downplayed, how Trump's methods got denounced by James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Dan Coats, John Bolton and John Kelly, feeling he's disorganized, untrusting of his advisors, changes the subject, repeats himself to run out the clock. Woodward concludes Trump is dangerous threat and seems to have suppressed an early desire to come to this conclusion. Some interview segments were dramatic, full on salesman versus journalist. Narration was natural, like Bob Woodward in the room. Includes excerpts from Bob Woodward’s interviews with President Donald J. Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film'. Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents. Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making.

In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months - an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind-the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the “dynamite behind every door'.Īt key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump’s head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans. Woodward, the number-one international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. Rage is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest.

Rage by Bob Woodward