PREVIEW: WAR, Bob Woodward’s best-seller on Trump, Biden, Harris and conflict

Strikingly relevant for the onrushing election is this much-talked-about new book, War, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bob Woodward.  He draws on his personal interaction with the presidential conflicts between Trump and Biden, as they tackle international clashes in Ukraine and the Middle East.

He brings his theme forward boldly:  “The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation, both to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to itself. There is no more serious business for a national government, no more accurate measure of national leadership. This book, WAR, presents the efforts and decisions to try to prevent war, and where war came, to avoid escalation.”

Woodward pulls no punches.  Here is how he summarizes his experience with Donald Trump:

“Trump’s war was the coronavirus pandemic and his performance revealed his character. These interviews showed a man with no fidelity to the truth, fixated on re-election and unequipped to deal with a genuine crisis.  The virus was deadly and a major threat to the country but he never developed a plan to respond. He did not know how to use his extraordinary executive power to prioritize saving American lives. Through defiant pronouncements, he downplayed and deflected any responsibility for handling it. There was no compassion. No courage.

“His lack of action on the coronavirus almost certainly cost him the 2020 election, according to his own pollsters.  Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal president. As I have pointed out, Trump governed by fear and rage. And indifference to the public and national interest.

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024.’

By contrast, here he is on Biden:

“Joe Biden is the first president in the 21st century who can say I don’t have American soldiers in war. Yes, there are wars. We’re not fighting them.”

“War”, this book on Biden, however, gave Woodward what was often a real-time, inside-the-room look at genuine good faith efforts by the president and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest. At the center of good governance, as evidenced in this book, is teamwork.

“The legacy of the Biden presidency will be the core national security team that he built and kept in place for nearly four years.

“I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.”

A book this rich in detail and anecdote cannot be covered in a precis, so I focus here on those sections most relevant to the current conflicts between men and madness.

Woodward starts or example with the cruelty of Trump’s behaviour when he unleashed the mob against the Capitol Building.  It took Trump 187 minutes to post a tweet telling his supporters to “go home.”

Even now, 35 years after his first interview with Trump, he realizes that Trump is convinced any loss — even a presidential election loss — could be brushed aside if he simply didn’t fold.

Republican strategist Ed Rollins once said of Trump, “There’s only one thing you need to know about him. He watches television all day and then at night goes on television.”

When Biden decided to run for president, he called Klain up to his home in Wilmington in early March 2019. Biden’s next words would stick forever with Klain: “This guy just isn’t really an American president.”

Biden barely mentioned Trump’s name, referring to him in public as “my predecessor” and often in private as “that fucking asshole.”

Internationally, U.S. intelligence analysts who profiled Putin had listed among the Russian leader’s main character traits that he was “thin-skinned,” “extremely insecure” and even “sadistic.”

Biden had later claimed that during a meeting he said to Putin, “I’m looking into your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.”  Putin smiled and told Biden, through an interpreter, “We understand one another.”

Contrast this with Trump’s assessment of Putin:  “Well, first of all, it’s sort of interesting. He said very good things about me,” Trump said. “He said, Trump is brilliant, and Trump is going to be the new leader and all that. And some of these clowns said, ‘you should repudiate Putin.’ I said, ‘why would I repudiate him?”

Trump idolized Putin, said Dr . Fiona Hill, a former intelligence analyst specializing in Russian affairs.  Hill believed that made him extremely vulnerable to manipulation. “He had a very fragile ego,” Hill said of Trump.  “When people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him.”

Biden had met three Soviet leaders and two Russian presidents.  Yet when he prepared for his meeting with Putin he called his advisors into a room and asked the group: Have I got it wrong? I haven’t seen this guy in a while. Does my assessment of him still hold true?  

Hill found Biden’s approach refreshing.

Trump had secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use as the virus spread rapidly through Russia. “Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump. “I don’t care,” Trump replied.  “No, no,” Putin said . “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”

“To him, Putin, Trump was an unknown,” said Biden’s National Security Advisor Lt. Gen Keith Kellogg. “Hell, we didn’t know how Trump would react at times. Trump was basically Jekyll and Hyde.”

Biden and Putin met at Villa La Grange, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, on June 16, 2021. He was surprised, and pleased, that Putin, who usually liked to make world leaders wait, had arrived on time. Putin had been 45 minutes late to his first formal meeting with Trump.  Curiously, Ukraine was barely a footnote in their conversation. Later, some would wonder if the failure to focus on it was a colossal mistake.

But he was not optimistic Putin would change his behavior, or Russia’s. “This is going to be hard,” Biden concluded…

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