Another White House Book Hits A Little Closer to Home

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump so alarmed his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, during a discussion last January of the nuclear standoff with North Korea that an exasperated Mattis told colleagues that “the president acted like — and had the understanding — of a ‘fifth- or sixth-grader.'”

At another moment, Trump’s aides became so worried about his judgment that Gary Cohn, then the chief economic adviser, took a letter from the president’s Oval Office desk authorizing the withdrawal of the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Trump, who planned to sign it, never realized it was missing.

These anecdotes are in a sprawling, highly anticipated new book by Bob Woodward, which depicts the Trump White House as a Byzantine, treacherous, often out-of-control operation — “crazytown,” in the words of the chief of staff, John Kelly — hostage to the whims of an impulsive, ill-informed and undisciplined president.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, “Fear,” which will be published next Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.

Woodward, a longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, has turned the internal dramas of several previous White Houses into best-sellers. In taking on Trump, he faced the challenge of an unusually leaky administration, which has already provided grist for countless news articles and one megabest-seller, “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff.

But Woodward’s book has unsettled the administration and the president, in part because it is clear that the author has spoken with so many current and former officials, although all on the condition that they not be cited as sources for the information.

Trump, after initially brushing it aside as “just another bad book,” accused Woodward of making up quotes from Mattis and Kelly, and perpetuating a “con on the public.” In a tweet, he suggested that the author was a Democratic operative who had timed the publication to hurt the president politically before the midterm elections.

The White House, in a statement, dismissed “Fear” as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the president look bad.” After hours of saturation news coverage on cable networks, “Fear” rocketed to No. 1 on Amazon.

Some of the freshest details in the 448-page book involve Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general who has been viewed as a stable anchor in Trump’s Cabinet. Woodward portrays Mattis as frequently derisive of the commander in chief, rattled by his judgment, and willing to slow-walk orders from him that he viewed as reckless. In the North Korea meeting, during a period of high tension with the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, Trump questioned Mattis about why the U.S. keeps a military presence on the Korean Peninsula. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Mattis responded to Trump, according to Woodward.

In April 2017, after President Bashar Assad of Syria launched a chemical attack on his own people, Trump called Mattis and told him by phone that he wanted the United States to assassinate Assad. “Let’s go in,” the president said, according to Woodward, adding a string of expletives.

The defense secretary hung up and told one of his aides: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” At his direction, the Pentagon prepared options for an airstrike on Syrian military positions, which Trump later ordered.

Mattis issued his own statement denying he ever used the “contemptuous words” that Woodward attributed to him. “While I generally enjoy reading fiction,” he said, “this is a uniquely Washington brand of literature, and his anonymous sources do not lend credibility.”

Woodward’s reporting adds another layer to a recurring theme in the Trump White House: frustrated aides who sometimes resort to extraordinary measures to thwart the president’s decisions — a phenomenon the author describes as “an administrative coup d'état.” In addition to Mattis and Cohn, he recounts the tribulations of Kelly and his predecessor, Reince Priebus, whose tensions with Trump have been reported elsewhere.

Cohn, Woodward said, told a colleague he had removed the letter about the Korea free trade agreement to protect national security.

Later, when the president ordered a similar letter authorizing the departure of the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement, Woodward said, Cohn and other aides plotted how to prevent him from going ahead with a move they feared would be deeply destabilizing.

“I can stop this,” Cohn said to the White House staff secretary at the time, Rob Porter, according to the book. “I’ll just take the paper off his desk.” Woodward reported new details about Cohn’s well-documented clash with the president over his equivocal response to the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. Cohn, who threatened to resign over the episode, was particularly shaken after one of his daughters discovered a swastika in her college dorm.

Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders were similarly fraught. During a phone call to negotiate the release of an Egyptian-American detained in Cairo, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said, “Donald, I’m worried about this investigation,” referring to the Russia inquiry. “Are you going to be around?”

In July 2017, Woodward said, Trump told Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia that he would exempt his country from steel tariffs, only to claim, nearly eight months later, that he had never made that promise. Pressed on it by Turnbull, Trump said, “Oh yeah, I guess I remember that.”

Cohn, Woodward said, concluded that Trump was a “professional liar.”

He found a sympathetic ear in Kelly, another retired Marine general, who frequently vented his frustration to colleagues about the president, whom he labeled “unhinged,” an “idiot” and “off the rails.” Kelly’s reference to Trump as an “idiot” has been reported before.

“We’re in crazytown,” Kelly said in one small meeting, according to Woodward. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”

Kelly also issued a denial on Tuesday, saying that “the idea I ever called the president an idiot is not true” and repeating his earlier insistence that he and Trump had “an incredibly candid and strong relationship.”

In Woodward’s account, Trump rarely returns the loyalty of his subordinates. He derided Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest political supporters, as “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner,” mimicking his accent and making fun of his halting answers during his Senate confirmation hearing.

Trump referred to Priebus as a “little rat” who just “scurries around.” For his part, Priebus described the White House as a Hobbesian world, in which officials delight in sticking knives into one another, according to the book.

“When you put a snake and rat and falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal into a zoo without walls, things started getting nasty and bloody,” said Priebus, whom Trump frequently ridiculed, before ousting him and leaving him on a rain-slicked tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base.

Woodward, who began work on the book soon after Trump’s inauguration, also documented the misgivings of the president’s former lawyer, John Dowd, about whether the president should submit to questions from the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller.

“Don’t testify,” Dowd told the president. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.”

Dowd denied on Tuesday that he ever said that.

Last January, Woodward writes, Dowd staged a practice session in the White House residence to dramatize the pressures Trump would face in a session with Mueller. The president stumbled repeatedly, contradicting himself and lying, before he exploded in anger.

“This thing’s a goddamn hoax,” Trump declared. “I don’t really want to testify.” Woodward did not interview Trump for the book. The author said he tried fruitlessly to get access to the president. After he had completed the manuscript, Trump called the author to express regret for not talking to him, blaming it on aides who he said had failed to inform him of Woodward’s interest.

In a transcript and tape of the call published Tuesday in the The Post, Woodward told Trump he interviewed many White House officials outside their offices and gathered extensive documentation. “It’s a tough look at the world and the administration and you,” he told Trump.

“Right,” the president replied. “Well, I assume that means it’s going to be a negative book.”