“It’s part of being president,” Graham replies. Bush “spent all that time with you, and you made him look like a fool.” The Trump book will probably be “a lousy book” too, Trump says, because this is what journalists do to him, this is what everybody does to him.Īt one point in the book, Trump complains to Graham about all the unfairness dropped on him-the pandemic, the lockdown, the Floyd killing, the protests. “I hope I’m not wasting my time,” he tells Woodward. Now and then, Trump worries out loud that the ploy won’t work. So Trump does talk to Woodward, for hours on end. He quotes former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (another well-treated source) as finding Kushner’s kowtowing toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “nauseating to watch.” And he quotes Kushner saying, after Mattis and Tillerson and others have quit or been fired, “We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the overconfident idiots,” so the administration now has “a lot more thoughtful people who kind of know their place and know what to do”-thus proving that Kushner is every bit as self-immolating and prone to projection as his father-in-law.

But even Woodward sees through Kushner’s craven shallowness. Woodward also seems to have talked a lot with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, and so describes him as “intelligent, organized, self-confident, and arrogant”-words that Kushner has probably dined out on. Mattis found himself often thinking that Coats was a model of what was needed in government service-though maybe he was too decent.” He was cool and not defensive, unintimidated by complexity. Hence: “Still waters ran deep in Dan Coats. Another major source is Dan Coats, whom Trump fired as director of national intelligence.

Bob woodward next book