Fear Was and Was Not as Fearful as I Feared

This may sound odd, but having just finished Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, I found myself with a better opinion of Trump than I had before reading the book. Now you know how low the bar had sunk for me! What I learned was that I had allowed my opinion of the president’s tweeting (I follow him on Twitter) to form most of my view of him, and unfortunately his tweets without other context create a cartoonish character, fairly one-dimensional.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were episodes when Trump actually thought about the good of the country. There were indications that he had some genuine fondness for his family. There were times that he cared to get something right, and the thing he wanted to get right was something I found myself approving. There were just enough of these sorts of episodes to raise my opinion of Trump somewhat.

That these were offset by his dangerous opinions that led to reckless decisions, particularly those concerning exiting trade deals that he couldn’t understand were tied to national security concerns, is still alarming. In fact, there is plenty in the book that is alarming about Trump’s ways of dealing with other people: his chaotic management style, his opinion that he does better without preparing to meet foreign leaders, his liking for pitting people against one another, his hubris in imagining that he knows more than he actually does, his inability to imagine that he has anything to learn (about economics, about world history and geopolitical reality, about basic human compassion, about compromise in order to get along with allies), and his lack of understanding that he knows very little about things that he should know, and above all, his inability to care about these things, or to want to change at all, still leaves me feeling that we have someone in the White House who utterly does not belong there.

A striking thing about the book is the tone. Woodward writes with such a tone of fairness and impartiality that it sometimes sounds compassionate and verges on creating sympathy for the protagonist; I had to keep reminding myself that this was Trump and to be aware that Woodward was providing plenty of evidence for disapprobation as well as approval—and such evidence for approval was extremely limited in comparison with the evidence on the other side.

The book ends about the first of June 2018, before some of the things that alarm me the most had even happened. I would love to have heard something about the separation of immigrant families on our southern border; something about Trump’s success and dismay at implementing his beloved tariffs and discovering other countries really would retaliate rather than negotiate; something about the fiasco of how he treated our European allies in Quebec at the G7 summit and afterward attacked Canada (Canada!) for daring to teach him about consequences painful to the United States; something about the way he treated dictators when he met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. But having read the book, I can now imagine something of the way these things unfolded behind the scenes.

It is truly alarming that Trump admires and flatters and verbally approves brutal dictators who murder their own and other countries’ people, especially since he attacks and is rude to and distances himself and by extension the rest of our country from the leaders of nations that are democracies, that hold free elections and have free presses and that grant their people as much peace and freedom as we have tried throughout our history to do ourselves.

And so although I now have a more nuanced, rounded view of the complex and deeply flawed man who is currently the President of the United States, I still fear what he can and will do while holding that office.