Fear: Trump in the White House
By Bob Woodward / Narrated By: Robert Petkoff
Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
Just can’t turn away from a train wreck
So Jon Ronson’s The Elephant in the Room delved so deeply into fake news that I wanted to take a bleach-dip after listening to it. And Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was so extraordinary that I wound up scratching my head because Steve Bannon wound up sounding like the only grown-up in the room (which I canNOT understand). I didn’t know what to think as I started listening to Fear by Bob Woodward.
Well, he tells you. And it’s not nice.
The odd thing is that none of it, not any part of the book, is much of a surprise. I guess when you have a President who Tweets his mind 24/7, ya kinda get a feeling for how he thinks, certainly for how he speaks. And it all is ultra-believable. Profanity-ridden language used in the Oval Office? Uhm, duh. (Besides which, I don’t think any President we’ve had speaks like a saint. Well… maybe Jimmy Carter avoided the F bomb…?) Not wanting to call violent KKKlanners bad people? Sure, seen it, heard it all.
What was surprising was how surrounded he is by either sycophants or people who think desperately poorly of him but who have too little moral fiber to actually say anything in public. Why aren’t more of the people who are depicted in this book on the record?
Then too, there are some people who had good principles and worked their hardest to deliver reality to Trump but who did abhorrent things in their personal lives which got them ousted, thus leaving Trump with no checks or balances.
Don’t get me wrong. I may be just a tad left of center, but the older I get, the more I adapt and adopt quite a few concepts from the right.
But this?!? Holy cow! Fear is informative (judging from Trump’s actions, one can tell he doesn’t have a good grasp on foreign policy, but I was blown away by how little he’s willing to learn), and often toe-curlingly amusing. Mostly, however, it felt like 12+ hours of listening to a really, really, shameful train wreck. Sometimes ya just can’t look away. But when you do look; it’s sickening.
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