Fear Book Summary - Fear Book explained in key points

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Fear summary

Name: Fear
Rating: 4 (53 reviews)
Author: Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward

Trump in the White House

4 (53 ratings)

22 mins

Table of Contents

Fear
summarized in 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Get an inside look at the Trump White House.

Back in the seventies, author Bob Woodward raised the bar on investigative journalism in Washington, DC, when he teamed up with Carl Bernstein to cover the Watergate scandal. Their work played a significant role in bringing impeachment charges against President Nixon, which led to his resignation.

Now, Woodward has turned his eye to the Trump administration. Though he doesn’t name his sources, he claims his reporting comes from hundreds of hours of witness interviews and those who participated firsthand in the events.

In these blinks, you’ll learn about the difficulties this administration faces and get an understanding of the interpersonal dynamics of the White House.

In these blinks, you’ll also discover

which literary titan Trump compared his tweets to;
which member of the Trump cabinet called the president a “moron”; and
how many hours of cable news Trump tends to watch every day.

Things were looking bad for the Trump campaign in 2016, and the Trump team wasn’t prepared to win.

Back in 2010, Steve Bannon was making political films to support the Tea Party, a right-wing populist movement that had taken American politics by surprise. That year, conservative pundit David Bossie took Bannon to meet Donald Trump, who was thinking of running for president as a Republican.

At the time, Bannon regarded the meeting as pointless. But he also found it highly entertaining, as Trump struggled to comprehend how his record of Democratic donations and pro-choice support could affect his chances as a Republican candidate. So, like many others, Bannon was surprised when Trump managed to secure the Republican nomination in the 2016 election.

By then, Bannon was running Breitbart News, an online outlet for far-right political commentary, and on August 13, 2016, he placed a call to Rebekah Mercer, one of Breitbart’s financial backers. Bannon saw that the Trump campaign was in trouble. That morning’s newspapers had Trump 20 points behind Clinton, and there were plenty of stories about the campaign being in disarray.

Indeed, Mercer told Bannon that Trump’s current campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was “a disaster.” She then advised Bannon to go meet with Trump and save the sinking boat. Mercer knew Trump was no stranger to Breitbart and that he liked and respected Bannon. Most of all, she knew Bannon was someone Trump would actually listen to.

Remarkably, with 85 days left before the general election, Bannon came on board and brought the campaign some much-needed focus. He laid out an easy-to-follow agenda centered around three things: immigration, jobs and foreign wars.

As Bannon saw it, these were the three areas where Trump’s stance differed most from Clinton’s. Soft on immigration, Clinton was both a globalist who would lose jobs to overseas competitors and part of the establishment that had resulted in too much military involvement on foreign soil. These were three positions she couldn’t defend, and as long as Trump kept hammering these points, he had a good chance of winning.

Sure enough, Bannon was right. But even Trump seemed surprised when the votes came in. He had spent zero time preparing a transition team or giving any thought to the 4,000 jobs that would need filling when he won. As Bannon put it, Clinton had spent her whole life preparing for the presidency; Trump didn’t spend one second.

As Trump put together his cabinet, he was shaken by news from the intelligence community.

During the campaign, the liaison between the Trump team and the Republican Party was Reince Priebus, who then became the White House chief of staff. But this was just one of many positions that needed filling.

For his secretary of defense, Trump favored the retired general Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, even though the pick didn’t sit well with Steve Bannon, who joined the administration as “chief strategist,” an invented position.

Afghanistan was another point of contention for the Trump White House.

Back in 2011, Trump was tweeting for troops to be taken out of Afghanistan, calling the whole mission there a “total disaster” and a “waste of billions.” This message was kept alive during his campaign, so he felt it was a promise to his voters that needed to be kept.

However, despite Trump’s demands, the issue of Afghanistan would be a persistent conflict throughout the administration’s first year.

Trump’s advisors have found him to be immovable on most subjects, especially trade deals.

According to the Bannon worldview, which Trump largely shared, politicians are responsible for the decline in good factory jobs in America. These were politicians who favored “globalism over Americanism.”

Trump’s economic advisor, and former Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, didn’t believe this, nor did 99 percent of the economists in the United States. Cohn had countless pages of data printed up to prove that free trade was good for the United States, and that the nation had moved from manufacturing to a service-based economy.

As staff secretary, Rob Porter kept the president from committing dangerous actions and tried in vain to establish order.

Rob Porter was a Harvard-educated lawyer who started out in politics as a Senate intern. Later, he worked as chief of staff for Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah. As Cohn saw it, Porter was one of the few stabilizing forces in the Trump White House.

Being staff secretary meant that Porter worked relatively closely with Trump, and Porter used this proximity to establish some order amid the general chaos that ruled in the White House. This meant protecting the president from distractions, negative influences and his own worst tendencies.

The Russian investigation has caused presidential meltdowns.

May 18, 2017, was a dark day in the White House. It was the day after former FBI head Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel by the Department of Justice to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise” from the ongoing investigation into Russian interference during the election. This broad directive essentially gave Mueller carte blanche to look into whatever he wanted.

The day after the news of the special investigation, Trump spent the day wallowing in uncontrollable anger. No one had seen him this angry before, but, unfortunately, the investigation would prove to be a continuing distraction that could set him off on a tirade at any moment.

Trump takes his tweets very seriously.

One of Trump’s closest aides since the campaign has been Hope Hicks, a former professional model who rose in the ranks to become his public-relations specialist. On June 29, 2017, Hicks felt she had to say something about Trump’s use of Twitter. As she explained it, “It’s not politically helpful.”

That day’s Twitter-related crisis was caused by a 6 a.m. tweet that said Mika Brzezinski, the cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, came to a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate with a botched face-lift that was “bleeding badly.”

Despite his best efforts to rein in Trump’s behavior, Reince Priebus resigned, followed by Bannon.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus called Trump’s bedroom the “devil’s workshop,” since it was the place where he liked to watch TV, get worked up over the news and send out disturbing tweets. Priebus considered Sunday evenings the worst for this kind of behavior and called it “the witching hour.”

Priebus tried to curb the damaging tweets by scheduling Trump less TV time on Sunday nights, but Trump still put in six hours a day in front of cable news. Priebus also tried to bring some order to Trump’s impulsive style by setting up his Rob Porter-centric system, but people still found ways around it.

Cohn helped get a faulty tax plan passed but resigned over Trump’s misguided tariffs.

The end of 2017 was marked by Trump’s tax bill, which would prove to be the only significant piece of legislation the Trump administration passed in its first year. It was aimed at cutting taxes for middle-income families, but Trump’s primary concern was cutting the corporate tax rate, which he believed would bring more money back to the United States.

Many big US companies were moving their headquarters to nations with lower corporate tax rates, like Ireland. They would then make their US offices a subsidiary and save money, a practice known as “inversion.”

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What is Fear about?

In Fear (2018), veteran journalist Bob Woodward explores the inner workings of the Trump administration. His reporting paints a picture of a disturbingly dysfunctional White House, staffed by individuals who are constantly undermining one another, often in an effort to prevent diplomatic and economic catastrophes from unfolding.

Who should read Fear?

Political junkies
US voters concerned about democracy
Anyone eager for a peek inside the White House

About the Author

Bob Woodward is the associate editor of the Washington Post, where he’s worked for 47 years. Along with journalist Carl Bernstein, he’s received two Pulitzer Prizes. Their book on the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men, was a national best seller, as were all of Woodward’s subsequent books, including Obama’s Wars and The Last of the President’s Men.

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