"Everybody on the Inside Knows It's True": Woodward's Reality Bomb is Blowing Up the West Wing
“Pandemonium” reigns as Trump cancels meetings, a top aide bemoans “Judas” colleagues, Jared and Ivanka try to talk sense into the president, and Gary Cohn wonders how he came off.
BY GABRIEL SHERMAN
SEPTEMBER 5, 2018 12:40 PM
The West Wing came to a virtual standstill yesterday after The Washington Post published the first excerpts of Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, Fear. The book by the veteran White House chronicler portrays Donald Trump as an unhinged and ill-informed commander in chief surrounded by aides who doubt his intelligence and question his fitness for office. “It’s pandemonium. He literally isn’t talking to anyone. He’s canceled meetings and is on the phone calling up his friends,” one source said. Current and former staffers, meanwhile, pointed fingers in all directions as they sought to deflect blame for the damaging leaks. “I’d rather be an unapologetic defender of Donald Trump than Judas,” one West Wing official told me.
Woodward’s book triggered Trump’s wrath on several levels. Two sources told me Trump is furious at the portions of the book that describe administration officials questioning his intelligence and emotional stability. Woodward reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot” and the West Wing “Crazytown”; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis compared Trump to a “fifth- or sixth-grader”; and Trump’s former personal lawyer called Trump a “fucking liar” who would end up in “an orange jumpsuit” if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Trump is also outraged that the book portrays aides as believing they are the grown-ups protecting the country from his dangerous impulses. Two sources said Trump is particularly angry with former economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is revealed in the book to have snatched a letter off Trump’s desk to protect “national security.” “He hates that people are leaking. They think they can take things off the Resolute desk because of this idea they’re ‘saving’ the country,” one senior West Wing official said. “I mean, who does that?” One source said Cohn called up his former colleagues to ask them how he came off in the book. “Gary wanted to make sure he didn’t compromise himself that much,” a source who spoke with Cohn said. (Cohn declined to comment.)
Sources also said Trump blames the White House communications staff and Kellyanne Conway for not bringing Woodward’s interview requests to him. “I’m just hearing about it. So we’re going to have a very inaccurate book,” Trump told Woodward in a phone call last month, a transcript of which the Post published yesterday. (Whether aides in fact failed to tell Trump about Woodward’s interview requests is unclear. Conway declined to comment.)
Woodward’s book isn’t officially on sale until next week, and aides fear how Trump will react as more embarrassing bits are reported. “It’s bad and it’s going to get worse,” a former West Wing staffer said. An outside adviser added, “Everybody on the inside knows it’s true. It’s just Fox News people who don’t want to admit how crazy he is.” Kelly and Mattis issued strong statements denying the quotes attributed to them, but two former administration officials said the book has rekindled Trump’s desire to fire both officials after the midterms. “That’s back on the table,” one said. Trump’s advisers also worry about how the president will respond to the increasing pressure of Mueller’s probe and the growing likelihood that Democrats will win back the House in November, thereby making impeachment a real possibility. “You can normally only do 10 percent of what he tells you to do. Ninety percent is fucking crazy,” a former West Wing official said, fretting about what Trump may instruct aides to do.
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