Frum: Woodward Missed Everything That Matters About the Trump Presidency

[babylonsister]

I have not read it yet.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/bob-woodwards-fear-trump/573067/

Woodward Missed Everything That Matters About the Trump Presidency
The ultimate White House tell-all actually tells disturbingly little of what the American public most needs to know.
12:06 PM ET
David Frum

snip//

Every book written about current affairs risks being outpaced. Seldom has that been more true than during the helter-skelter Trump years. I’ve struggled with this problem myself, and well appreciate how difficult it is. The uniquely powerful impact of Woodward’s reporting, however, magnifies the consequence of those difficulties in his case.

Fear is likely to remain the single most read book about the Trump presidency for some considerable time. Any misjudgments are disproportionately likely to mislead public understanding. The MbS instance is only one of a great many such misjudgments in Fear.

Fear either ignores—or outright denies—the most serious concerns about the Trump presidency. Its slam-bang quotes hit hard, but they also consistently miss the most important targets. The ultimate Trump tell-all actually tells disturbingly little of what the American public most needs to know. Now that the public has absorbed Woodward’s revelations, it is time to undo the harm done by Woodward’s methods.

Woodward sees himself as just a reporter, collecting facts and offering them to readers. As he told an interviewer in March, “My job is not to take sides. I think it’s important to send the message to people and to act and be as careful and neutral as possible.”

This commitment to neutrality promises fairness. Its effect, however, can be to absolve the journalist of responsibility. Woodward cares a great deal about accuracy: If he is describing a conversation, he will check the memories of as many participants as will speak to him, checking and double-checking that he has reproduced as nearly as possible what happened in the room. But there he stops. It’s not his job, as he seems to see it, to check what happened in the room against what happened in the external world. His disavowal of any point of view of his own effectively resigns the book to the control of his sources and their points of view. Which is how a book about Trump’s Washington can end up doing the work of advocacy for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia’s high-risk authoritarianism.

snip//

Fear paints a damning picture of Trump the human being. Who will soon forget Trump’s derisive comment that H. R. McMaster—whose life of service to the United States crimped his clothing budget—“dressed like a beer salesman”? Yet in the end it offers a remarkably forgiving assessment of Trump the president. The Trump presidency without the corruption, without the Russia entanglement, without the racism, without the abuse of women is hardly recognizable as the Trump presidency at all. There are worse offenses than messiness, after all.

Woodward approaches the Trump presidency as he has approached every other subject in his long and distinguished career. But the Trump presidency is something quite unlike anything anyone in Washington has seen before. Woodward’s access to that administration’s relatively normal figures—Cohn, Porter, Priebus, and their colleagues—actually erodes rather than enhances understanding of the administration’s actions. Their need to justify their own service to Trump compels them to minimize what Trump is and extenuate what he is doing. Woodward’s reliance upon them leads him to minimize and extenuate, too. If the only things we had to fear about the Trump administration were the stories told in Fear, Americans and the world could relax. Unfortunately, by relying on Trump’s enablers, America’s most legendary reporter has largely missed the biggest part of what they enabled.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. this

Especially the last two paragraphs. The book was a big disappointment in my eyes.

[violetpastille]

2. Frum's "Trumpocracy" was a disappointment in my eyes too.

It didn't say anything we don't already know.

(Also my problem with evening MSNBC. By the time it airs we've already been through it.)

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

3. It was hard to read the tangelos name so many times.

i found myself w a headache...often. He needs to be thrown out, then someone write a book.

[Hekate]

4. Ouch. I hope Frum keeps writing. I have a copy of Fear, but we need many more points of view as well

[UTUSN]

5. K&R

[Cicada]

6. David Frum's teachers deserve the Nobel prize

His review of Fear is spectacular. Thousands comment on Woodward’s books. Frum nails it. His review doesn’t use genius, tho I’m sure Frum has genius level IQ. It systematically breaks the book into its parts and considers the probable cause of the parts. Then he weaves those causes into understanding the books flaws. In my opinion someone probably taught Frum to reason like that, by example and by comment in Frum’s early efforts. Other reviewers probably ask themselves why didn’t I see that. They should ask themselves why wasn’t I that systematic. Almost every reviewer could have done what Frum did. They just didn’t take the right approach. Process made Frum’s article so great imo. We can all learn from this, we can all improve our game, by carefully analyzing what Frum did here. I have learned this from him. Break things into small parts, analyze each. Put each analysis in a big box. After the parts are all done spread them all out on a big table and find the common threads, find the bigger picture, the forest those trees form. My two bits on this amazing Frum article.