While I'm not wanting to give credit to the voices of John Bolton or Anthony Scaramucci, Bob Woodward and Mary Trump are spot on. I also understand the psychopathy and malignant narcissism of this man who sits in the White House. Like my mother who’s mental illness was once very similar, under the bravado and brutality, the tough guy strong man image, the grandiosity and entitlement, the raging and blaming is indeed a terrified little child.
Bob Woodward: ‘I can’t think of a time I’ve felt more anxiety about the presidency’
Bob Woodward is associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of 20 books on American politics. In 50 years as a journalist he has covered nine presidents. His reporting on the Watergate break-in and cover-up with his colleague Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon and won the Post a Pulitzer prize. His latest book about Donald Trump, Rage, is based on 10 hours of interviews, spread over 19 taped phone calls, often initiated by the president himself, in which Trump proved “only too willing to blow the whistle on himself”, as the Observer’s review noted.
There is an atmosphere in Washington of high anxiety. Trump is melting down, to put it charitably. His campaign has been about lashing out, about wanting his former political opponents – President Obama and Joe Biden, who’s now running against him, of course – to be indicted then charged. Then there was his announcement that he is not necessarily going to accept the electoral result against him. The idea that the president would put in doubt the basic process of democracy and voting is not only unacceptable, it is a nightmare.
Now you have the added factor that Trump’s also had Covid-19 and he’s on steroids, saying things like, “It is a blessing from God that I got the virus”. I can’t think of anything more absurd, or crueller, than calling it a blessing from God. More than 210,000 people have died in the US. For the president of the US to talk like that is unbelievable, but I think people have become numb to it. The outrages pile up, in a way. People have forgotten the risks. I think Kamala Harris put it very well in the vice-presidential debate: what’s happened in the US with Covid-19 is the biggest failure of the president to exercise his responsibilities, perhaps in the history of the US.
This is a really dangerous period before the election. I got to know Trump very well in hours and hours of interviews I did with him for my book, Rage, and I think if there were to be some accident, some problem, during the final campaign weeks, he would capitalise on it. Henry Kissinger, of all people, was warning recently that we should worry about some sort of crisis, and reminded people that the first world war started because of an accident. Probably no one’s wanting to start a war right now, but we have a climate in the Middle East, and in the South China Sea, which China has really militarised, where you could have some spark trigger a mild confrontation – not that I think Trump’s going to manufacture that.
Trump is not sufficiently tuned into the attitudes and experiences of other people, which is an essential requirement of a leader. After George Floyd was killed, I asked him about the tensions ignited in this country not seen since the heights of the civil rights movement. I said we were men of white privilege, that we’ve got to understand the pain and anger black people feel in this country. That’s when he said something that astonished me: “Wow, you sure drank the Kool-Aid! I don’t feel that at all.” He just rejected the idea that somehow white people have to understand the pain and anger of others. I think that’s one of his chief problems. He thinks in terms of his own pain and anger, and what he wants to do, which is to be re-elected.
Trump also told me the US has nuclear weapons that are so devastating even President Putin and President Xi of China don’t know about them. I’m not exactly sure even today whether he was exaggerating or talking about something real. But what’s a really important question to consider here is how much power is in the presidency: when we decide to go to war, whether you look at Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s all been led by the president, essentially, as commander in chief. As we’ve gone into a media environment of impatience and speed because of the internet, the president is also in this position to seize the airwaves. As his son-in-law Jared Kushner said, the news is going along and then Trump tweets something and everyone drops whatever it is. Trump realises this. He uses it. He has that power. He loves being in control. He loves the spectacle. The circumstances have all converged here to give him extraordinary power.
Looking to the aftermath of the election, Trump’s set the table to say that if he doesn’t win, he’s going to be suspicious of mail-in votes. I think the question is: if he loses, will his political party get together and go see him and talk to him, and say, you can’t do this? You can’t do it to the Republican party and most importantly you can’t do it to the country. There has to be an orderly transference of power, if that’s what it comes to.
This is the level of anxiety I have now as a reporter: I go to sleep and get up in the middle of the night and start checking the news because God knows what might have happened. We are sitting on pins and needles in this country about every moment, every action, every assessment, and it is draining. I think lots of people have got to the point where they are tuning Trump and the political situation out as well as they can.
Unfortunately, the impacts on people’s lives carry on, given the virus, given there’s no plan, or organised way of dealing with this. It’s all seat-of-the-pants impulsive decision-making. I can’t think of a time – and I’ve been a reporter for nearly 50 years – where I’ve felt more anxiety about the country and the presidency and the future.
Mary Trump is a psychologist and the niece of Donald Trump. Her father, Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, died when she was 16. Her tell-all book about the president and the Trump family, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, sold almost 1m copies on the first day it was published in July this year.
My theory about the way Donald has run his campaign is that he knows he’s in desperate shape, so he’s going to burn it all down, sow more chaos and division, because that’s where he succeeds. He knows that he’s losing – he’ll deny it mightily – and at some level he understands what’s at stake. If he loses, he’s probably going to prison. So, if he’s going down, he’s going to take us all down with him.
I’ve always believed that deep down Donald is a terrified little boy. The amount of fear he’s feeling now has got to be unhinging him. Not only did he get sick with the virus, there’s the tax story and his prospects in the election looking really bad right now. He’s got to be absolutely panicked.
Throughout the campaign I thought that the absolute worst scenario would be for him to get the virus and then get well. I know that sounds awful. He’s ignored the severity of the pandemic all year because the idea of illness as weakness is so deeply ingrained in my family, that even an association with it is unacceptable, and that’s why now we’ve got 210,000 Americans dead. But now his statement – you can beat it, don’t be afraid of it – is going to result in more people becoming sick, and many of those will die. Even before he said that, I believed he was engaging in mass murder, but that sealed it for me. Anybody who’s capable of putting hundreds of millions of people at risk to avoid looking bad doesn’t care about you.
Since Donald was elected, I’ve been surprised by nothing he’s done or said. But I have been shocked by the wholesale abdication of responsibility by the Republican party during this election campaign and throughout the past four years. I didn’t understand the extent to which they would be willing to enable him in Congress and in his cabinet. If they had done their job and acted as a separate branch of government, he would have been contained. By siding with him 100% of the time, they have ensured we are now faced with several concurrent disasters that are getting exponentially worse.
No other president in history has been able to push the envelope the way Donald does. He’s always trying to see what he can get away with and, as I have seen through the course of his life, he’s always got away with everything. No one holds him accountable. He constantly gets rewarded for failing. The Republicans understood what he was capable of and have allowed him to push through an agenda that is completely at odds with what the majority wants.
In Donald, I see somebody who is afraid, lonely, desperate, unloved. I hesitate to paint a compassionate portrait of him because he’s so culpable. However, I do have compassion for the three-year-old who was without his mother for a whole year when she was sick. That loss of affection and having no one to soothe him was deeply harmful. And when she recovered to the extent that she did, she did nothing to heal the wounds of that separation, and that’s before we get to my grandfather, who was always an awful person, capable of such abject cruelty and sadism. So now we have an adult Donald who is sad, lonely, ignorant but who also has immense power – and that is a terrifying prospect.
People need to stop worrying about what might happen if he loses but doesn’t accept the results and laugh in his face. That’s the best way to undermine him. If he wins, it won’t be legitimate. He’s already using the powers of his office to shake people’s confidence in mail-in voting at a time when people want to be voting by mail during the pandemic. He’s telling his followers if Biden wins it will have been rigged, telling them to show up at the polls to make sure there’s no fraud, which is voter intimidation. If you’re a black person in America and a bunch of white guys with automatic weapons are standing outside the polling station you won’t want to vote, which is exactly what Donald wants to happen.
If he stays in the Oval Office, I’m going to try to get a British passport because I don’t think I’ll fare well. He’s an extraordinarily vindictive person surrounded by people who are willing to help him be vindictive. But that’s personal: in terms of the country, if he wins, it’s over. Democracy is over. The western alliance is over. We’ll be entering an incredibly dark period of autocracy on a global scale.
To continue this article, please go here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/25/deep-down-terrified-little-boy-bob-woodward-mary-trump-john-bolton-anthony-scaramucci-on-donald-trump
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