They're all to blame

Nearly 300 pages into Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, a West Wing aide named Zach Fuentes cautions fellow staffers. With depressingly familiar words, Fuentes informs his colleagues, “He’s not a detail guy. Never put more than one page in front of him. Even if he’ll glance at it, he’s not going to read the whole thing. Make sure you underline or put in bold the main points … you’ll have 30 seconds to talk to him. If you haven’t grabbed his attention, he won’t focus.” Some subjects, such as the military, do engage him, but the overwhelming picture is worrying and dire.

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Fuentes is merely an assistant to John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. [...] [I]t’s probably worth mentioning that Fuentes wasn’t talking about Donald Trump; no, he was talking about John Kelly.

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Perhaps the biggest non-hinge moment in the book occurs in July 2017, six months after Trump has taken office and two years since he emerged as a presidential candidate by offering his thoughts on Mexican rapists. “Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy, and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.” The two men decide to meet to “develop an action plan,” which consists of getting the president in the Tank, “the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” because it might “focus him.” But when they do, and succeed in telling him about the value of allies and diplomacy, Trump ignores them and proceeds to rant and rave on a variety of subjects. The meeting wraps up after accomplishing precisely nothing. (This is the event that caused Rex Tillerson to call Trump a “fucking moron.”)

What remains astonishing about the meeting is not that Trump is an idiot. It’s that Mattis and Cohn seemed to have hopes for their plan, believing they could use the sit-down to really turn a corner. The book is so full of scenes like this because the people around Trump seem to have less feel for the president than a politically astute person who spends 20 minutes a day reading the newspaper.

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Despite all the self-aggrandizing quotes from the so-called moderating influences in the White House, the upshot of Woodward’s own reporting is that if we end up riding out this term free of a foreign policy catastrophe, it is more likely to be the result of Trump’s incuriosity and short attention span than a bold act of bravery by one of the grown-ups.

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Nevertheless, there is a strong argument to be made that someone like Mattis should stay in his job, and the person who wants to see him resign in protest is braver than I am. But the case to keep working in the Trump administration is much weaker if your job isn’t a matter of life and death.

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Nor does it ever seem to occur to Porter—or Gary Cohn, whose supposedly tortured post-Charlottesville dilemma is afforded considerable space—that Trump is a racist; that he will continue putting into effect racist policies; and that focusing, as the people around Trump do, on ensuring that the words of his speeches are inoffensive is really just a way of helping Trump politically so he can carry out his policies with less opposition.

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“As an extreme measure,” Woodward writes with a straight face, the staffers “proposed they set up a committee. They would draft some tweets that they believed Trump would like.” This plan naturally fails, but what exactly were they trying to accomplish, and why?

The story is presented as one in a long line of “here are the adults trying to moderate Trump” tales, but except for a cursory reference to the possibility of a tweet getting us into war with North Korea, it is very clear that the group simply thought Trump’s tweets were hurting him politically. [...] It’s one thing to tell yourself you are saving the world from nuclear annihilation; it’s another to just wish the president was slightly less uncouth.

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I trust Woodward’s ability to decipher whether his sources are being honest more than I do Michael Wolff’s, whose dodgy book on the Trump presidency set a very low bar for works like this, but too much of Woodward’s narrative feels reliant on the firsthand accounts of a group of very untrustworthy people.

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Where does all this leave John Kelly, the ultimate adult in the room who is often portrayed in the media as rubbing his temples in frustration with his toddler-like boss? Kelly enters and leaves meetings, gets angry and calms down, rants and raves, all to diminishing returns. He seems to find the president incurious and stupid and potentially dangerous, but nevertheless shares a slightly tamer version of his authoritarian instincts and disdain for immigrants. [...] Like the other characters in the book, Kelly is insufficiently concerned about Trump’s contempt for democracy; unable to truly understand—regardless of his strong criticisms—how incapable of restraint Trump is; and compromised by his own sympathy for too much of the president’s agenda, which has a way of dulling any resistance to the worst aspects of it.

  Slate

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.