But he broke his silence this summer after mounted police cleared protesters from Washington's Lafayette Square so the president could have a photo opp in front of the neighboring St. Mattis had been conspicuous in his reticence to criticize the president. (In Coats' case, he was removed from service by Trump via tweet while he was golfing at one of Trump's clubs.) The stars are former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, both of whom had troubled tenures. Woodward's subsequent decades of work have been widely acclaimed but also often been held at arm's length for their reliance on 'blind quotes.'īut in this book, Woodward is making many, if not all, his sources plain. That work was, and remains, controversial for its reliance on unnamed sources.

The first was All the President's Men, the inside story of the reporting of Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to criminal prosecutions and impeachment proceedings and the eventual resignation of President Richard M. Kamala Harris and other Democrats watching the State of the Union speech. On one occasion, Trump orders his aide Dan Scavino to screen a video of Sen. Trump has what Woodward calls 'props,' such as a stack of parchment signifying judicial appointments, or a wall poster-size picture of Trump with Kim Jong Un.

At times, they seem serious interchanges at times they are show-and-tell sessions to win the journalist over. 'That is, if you're willing to write it.')Īt times the interviews are in the White House, at times they are impromptu calls the president places to Woodward's personal phone. ('Let's see if we can get a good book,' he says. This time around, as though to compensate and produce a better narrative, Trump goes to the opposite extreme. The president said his staff had not told him of Woodward's many requests. 'Pray to God we don't have a crisis,' Woodward said when Fear first appeared.Ĭuriously, the earlier Woodward book featured zero interview material from Trump - there had been no interview. Was there no one in Trump's communications office to question this commitment of the president's time? Who but Trump could have arranged 17 interviews with a man who had written critically of eight presidents, including an earlier book characterizing Trump as unprepared and unfit for his office, a national disaster waiting to happen? Where did Woodward get these arresting statements? They were part of a series of interviews Trump granted the venerable journalist from The Washington Post - a total of 17 in all, stretching from December to late July. I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic.'

Woodward quotes a subsequent interview on March 19, wherein Trump says: 'I always wanted to play it down.

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