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"This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner" and other hot takes from Bob Woodward's upcoming "Fear: Trump in the White House"


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Lol 

 

https://slate.com/culture/2018/09/bob-woodwards-new-book-fear-trump-in-the-white-house-reviewed.html

 

Nearly 300 pages into Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, a West Wing aide named Zach Fuentes cautions fellow staffers. With depressingly familiar words, Fuentes informs his colleagues, “He’s not a detail guy. Never put more than one page in front of him. Even if he’ll glance at it, he’s not going to read the whole thing. Make sure you underline or put in bold the main points … you’ll have 30 seconds to talk to him. If you haven’t grabbed his attention, he won’t focus.” Some subjects, such as the military, do engage him, but the overwhelming picture is worrying and dire. Still, one could finish this passage and feel at least slightly relieved that people like Fuentes are aware of the reigning deficiencies in the White House, and doing their best to mitigate them.

Fuentes is merely an assistant to John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, but Kelly and James Mattis, the secretary of defense, are presented throughout Woodward’s book as being cognizant of the president’s extreme limitations and authoritarian instincts, and rather boldly willing to push back against their boss. This is why it’s probably worth mentioning that Fuentes wasn’t talking about Donald Trump; no, he was talking about John Kelly.

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I bought Fear last night and started reading it.  Only 2 chapters in and it's pretty good.  I'm glad that Woodward has tapes of most of his interviews, but they are considered "deep source" or whatever, so the chances of us hearing the tapes or finding out the identity of those interviewed are pretty low. 

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Completely anecdotal of course :p but the credibility of Woodward seems to really be helping the sales of this book. I briefly stopped by a book shop here in Germany this evening and they were pushing this book pretty hard, with multiple displays set up. Looks like they'd already sold quite a few copies. 

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Did Cohn cuck out yet? Because this chapter I just read makes him out to be the most sane one in the room. There’s a bit where he has to talk to Peter Navarro and Trump like they’re children to explain the economy, even going as far as to say that industries die eventually, and towns like the ones Trump promised to bring jobs back to need to learn a new trade.

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