Bob Woodward

“Explosive.”—The Washington Post “Devastating.”—The New Yorker “Unprecedented.”—CNN THE INSIDE STORY ON PRESIDENT TRUMP, AS ONLY BOB WOODWARD CAN TELL IT With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence. Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office.

Trump in the White House

Fear

Patrick Book

Maybe this is low-hanging fruit, but Woodward’s access is incredible, the stories are unbelievable, and the reality of the chaos behind the scenes and Trump’s refusal to be anything even approaching a rational adult is depressing.

Timeo Williams

Very well written. This is my first book from Bob Woodward and it makes sense as to why he's an critically acclaimed author. 

This book gave great insight into the cabinet, the thoughts of those working under Trump and Trump's thoughts actions as well.

Andrew John Kinney

Much of what is in this book has been widely reported in the news, but at least Woodward's book confirms much that we have read in other sources. Trump is apparently just as impulsive, dishonest, and unreflective as he appears, so no surprise there. One thing I agree with him on is his challenge to military leaders to explain what the end game is in Afghanistan - there is an account of him meeting with Mattis and the Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and asking, "Why are we still in Afghanistan after 17 years?" Good question, and one for which the generals did not have a good answer, other than, it's better to stay than to lose. Then they used the argument that terrorists will come back to A-stan if we leave and plan another 9/11, to which Trump replies, "You've told me ISIS is in 25 countries - why can't they plan another 9/11 from Sudan, or wherever?" Good question.

On one paper Trump was given, he hand-wrote a note which said, "Trade is bad", and that sums up his view of economics, hence the tariffs. I'm afraid it's going to take a recession to prove him wrong. Gary Cohn tried over and over to basically teach Economics 101 (I'm not exaggerating) to Trump, but he wouldn't listen. Sadly, many things that Trump says are true, and should be addressed, like Chinese theft of intellectual property - I've done business in China, and that is absolutely real and pervasive. But the way he's doing it is hurting the U.S.

In foreign affairs, there is the bizarre hate of NATO and the Europeans, but more scary is how close we apparently came to nuking North Korea. I served in Korea in the Army, and if the NK's were attacked, they can kill a million South Koreans in minutes with conventional artillery, let alone nuclear missiles. Trump and his advisors didn't care, and it wasn't a bluffing strategy. Thank goodness that situation is at least temporarily defused. Back to NATO, one thing that irritates me about the media is that they never exploded the "2% of GDP" spending myth that Trump kept repeating about NATO allies. His claim was that the NATO countries were spending less on NATO than the U.S., which is patently false. The U.S. has only 60,000 troops (Air Force & Army) in NATO. The French have over 200,000, the Germans over 100,000, the Poles over 100,000. And it is false to say, "Well, we could just move Army divisions to Europe" - not unless you want to wait six months, which is kind of worthless in the event of attack. The actual U.S. contribution as part of the Defense budget is at most 20% of DoD, and so that puts our contribution at less than 0.8% of GDP. And yet the media never did the math on that, and it's not even difficult math.

The book seems a bit limited in scope, and I'm sure that is driven by the list of people Woodward was able to get to talk to him. So we get a lot of Steve Bannon's thoughts, a lot of Reince Priebus, a lot of Gary Cohn and John Dowd. But it's enough to paint a fairly complete and unsurprising picture of Trump: the guy who won't listen, who "just knows stuff", has no empathy, won't read or study, and makes impulsive, on-the-spot decisions that his staff has to try to correct or un-do. I guess "Fear" is the right name for the book, because the chaos and uninformed decision-making in the White House scared the hell out of me.

Wynter

When picking up books on a potentially controversial subject, I like to take a quick look at the author’s resume. Woodward seemed like a good candidate to tell a story of a very dividing figure like Trump without bias, zeal, and hysteria that I so dislike in reporting. And he delivered. Fear is cold, hard-fact journalism that does not aim to ridicule the current US President, but rather offer a faithful account of the first two years in office and let the reader draw the conclusions.

As someone who watches the drama in the White House from across the pond, I don’t get very emotional about Trump, unlike the American citizens that identify as Democrats. I think often the media circus likes to dismiss Trump as an idiotic caricature that got into power by some fluke or foreign meddling. However, after reading Fear, I have to ask myself whether Trump is really an ignorant, bombastic clown that blindly follows hunches, or if he is a dark horse carefully manipulating and lying to gain some personal interest. Either way, having this volatile person conducting a crazy train is a scary thought, and hardly funny. Fascinating read.

Cindy

Amy Maddess

It was a little disjointed - it read more like a timeline than a book. It was just one event/ catastrophic mistake made by Trump after another, listed relatively chronologically and separated only by paragraph spacing. It was hard to keep track of who he was fighting with, what policy he was meddling with, and who was resigning within each paragraph. Maybe if these sections were structured in a more narrative way, or had been grouped together by instance, topic, or theme, it would have been easier to stay on track. I understand that this is nonfiction, and the authour does not owe me a narrative or even a theme, but with the title of the book being this ominous word “Fear” I thought maybe the authour would link Trump’s campaign and ruling of fear together in a way that was fluid to read. The authour did make like two attempts to do this, but it wasnt until the final quarter of the book. Trump did and still does many crazy, outlandish and hurtful things, so the book was still interesting purely because it is surreal that these things have occurred in real time history - I just wish it hadn’t read like a 362 page recap of the last four years’ news headlines. (Maybe I was looking for new research and things I hadn’t heard on the news? Maybe I was looking for the authour to shed some light on this surreal pandemonium? Maybe I just wanted closure and understanding of this terrifying political climate we still find ourselves in, and maybe that is too much to place on an authour/journalist? Maybe what I wanted from this book (to erase the last four years, to tell me that everyone was just kidding and that Trump was never elected) is bigger than a book could deliver?)

Sahi K

After reading this book, I’ve realized that none of it seems very surprising or unexpected, and I don’t know if there is anything scarier.

Well written book that doesn’t shy away from naming anyone, but it’s also well balanced and gives voice to everyone’s personal perspective.

Mariana Afonso

”The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”


This book follows the first years of Trump’s Presidency, giving the reader a look into the White House and the decisions that happened there.

It is a great piece of journalism and it is extremely thorough, providing details of the conversations and decisions regarding some of the most reported political events from 2016 to 2018.


It allows us to see how Trump’s idea (and then decision) to race for President evolved, how unprepared he was, how he absorbed every ounce of information people gave him, how he would shift his agenda (even contradicting his previous actions) in order to raise support from those who could not see themselves represented by his opposition - populism in its basic form.

The narrating of the White House shenanigans and of how Trump could easily be manipulated, or disregard people who actually knew about their job due to simple moments of disagreement, showed how delusional the President of the USA is, and how incapable and unfit for the job he is.

Joshua Line

4.5 stars based on the last line of the book.

Megan Weber

this was kind of hard to read but i donˋt especially like nonfiction

OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD RUNAWAY #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SENSATIONAL #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “Explosive.”—The Washington Post “Devastating.”—The New Yorker “Unprecedented.”—CNN “Great reporting...astute.”—Hugh Hewitt THE INSIDE STORY ON PRESIDENT TRUMP, AS ONLY BOB WOODWARD CAN TELL IT With authoritative reporting honed through nine presidencies, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump’s White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president’s first years in office. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. Often with day-by-day details, dialogue and documentation, Fear tracks key foreign issues from North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, NATO, China and Russia. It reports in-depth on Trump’s key domestic issues particularly trade and tariff disputes, immigration, tax legislation, the Paris Climate Accord and the racial violence in Charlottesville in 2017. Fear presents vivid details of the negotiations between Trump’s attorneys and Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, laying out for the first time the meeting-by-meeting discussions and strategies. It discloses how senior Trump White House officials joined together to steal draft orders from the president’s Oval Office desk so he would not issue directives that would jeopardize top secret intelligence operations. “It was no less than an administrative coup d’état,” Woodward writes, “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”

Ilia Markov

Very professional writing and reporting -- there are no bombastic stories of Trump's incompetence and no moral judgment either (we're left to make up our own mind)

Fear Trump in the White House

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