Rage by Bob Woodard

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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:25 pm

The betrayal was deep for Tillerson. In his view, the president had broken two of the three promises he had asked for before taking the job: Trump had agreed to let Tillerson pick his own senior staff, but Trump or the White House had continually meddled with or vetoed Tillerson’s picks. And the president had pledged they would never have a dispute in public, but he had been summarily fired, without discussion and by tweet. The only promise Trump had kept was not to pull Tillerson’s nomination.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:27 pm

Mattis was frustrated with the message being sent to China, Russia and North Korea. “What we’re doing is we’re actually showing how to destroy America,” he said later. “That’s what we’re showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it’s working very well. We are declaring war on one another inside America. It’s actually working against us right now.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:28 pm

The greatest threat to the national security apparatus, Coats believed, was that Trump wanted to ignore any kind of process that went through experts—people steeped in certain issues or certain parts of the world, often for their whole careers. In effect, and often literally, the president said, I don’t need that to be done. I don’t need these people. I don’t need a National Security Council. I just need myself, and perhaps three or four people I trust and work with. Trump didn’t care for assessments or options. It was just whatever Trump wanted to do.

“Oh, Mr. President,” Coats said more than once, “it’s a little more complicated than that.”

Trump would get upset as if he was being undermined and thwarted. The president believed he could pick up the phone and call anybody he wanted. Trump’s attitude was: “I can solve all these problems.” He thought he could get better intelligence on his own. Coats knew that key leaders such as Putin, Xi of China and Erdogan of Turkey would lie to Trump. They played Trump skillfully. They would roll out the red carpet for him, flatter him, then do what they wanted.

Coats felt like he had never cracked the code with Trump.

“I can’t believe what he said,” Coats often exclaimed to his staff, wife or Mattis, reacting to some Trumpian declaration. And then the next day, Trump would say the opposite. Coats’s head was often spinning.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:28 pm

Coats knew President Dwight Eisenhower had said that the White House is “the loneliest house I’ve ever been in.” It seemed to Coats that Trump was alone a lot in an empty house, particularly on weekends. And that, Coats believed, had to have an impact, increasing Trump’s sense of isolation. Coats found that Trump was becoming more and more paranoid and lonely.

The president’s phone habits were also troubling to Coats, especially at night. At one point after about nine months in office, Coats had stopped getting transcripts or readouts of the president’s conversations with foreign leaders. He had his staff inquire with the NSC staff. Why? He never got an explanation after several tries. But he never asked the president directly. Coats finally concluded that the mad and maddening phone calls reflected Trump’s style, who he is. And it wasn’t going to be fixed.

One response was to let the disarray flow over him, but Marsha could see her husband internalized the turmoil.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:31 pm

Wei, a former member of China’s governing Politburo and a former artillery and rocket force officer, had not seen combat. Mattis had, in the deserts of the Middle East—Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq. Mattis believed a lack of wartime experience often lured people into taking risks they otherwise might not.

Now Mattis pushed closer to the bone. “Are you aware that it was the Americans that created the world that allowed the hardworking Chinese people to advantage themselves and move out of poverty?” Mattis asked, turning to look at Wei. Trade with America had helped propel the dramatic modernization of China.

Wei looked intently at Mattis and pulled him close, an apparent gesture of unusual affection.

“Yes,” Wei said. “And we know we owe the Americans most of the thanks for this.” No ambiguity. “Absolutely,” he said. “We owe the Americans most.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” Mattis said. “So I hope we can figure out how to make things work.”


“Look if you want to fight, I’ll fight. I’ll fight anybody. I’ll fight frigging Canada, okay,” Mattis said. “But I’ve had enough of fighting. I’ve written enough letters to mothers. I don’t need to write any more. And you don’t need to write them, either.”

Mattis knew that like Wei, most of China’s military officers had perhaps never experienced armed combat—and certainly had not in any major conflicts since China’s short-lived invasion of Vietnam in 1979.

Mattis wanted Wei to know that war would be extraordinarily tough on the Chinese.

“I’ll just tell you,” Mattis said, “the country I would most be willing to fight would be one whose entire officer corps had never heard a shot fired at them. War is so different from training that a shock wave will go through them. I’ve got—probably 80 percent of my officers have been shot at in one form or another. But I’d prefer not to put them through another war.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:31 pm

Milley also improved the physical fitness of the Army, an issue of immense importance to Mattis. “It was humiliating to watch the U.S. Army march in a parade and then go watch the Mexican army or the Ukrainian army or the Norwegians,” Mattis said. The armies of other nations were so much more fit. He concluded that a third of the Army was overweight or obese. It was appalling. Milley had aggressively raised Army physical fitness.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:31 pm

Trump’s problem extended further, to the president’s failure to build a smooth working team—to listen, gather various informed opinions, debate, identify options, debate some more and bring everyone on board with a decision.

“I consider myself the most reluctant person on earth to go to war,” Mattis wrote in his 2019 book on leadership. But it had to be asked: What might it mean if a war came and the best person was not in the chairmanship? Suppose the great military leaders of World War II had been cast aside on the impulse of the commander in chief? In that environment, would there have been an Eisenhower or Marshall or MacArthur or Nimitz or Halsey? And what would have been the price paid for not having them there?

The answer, of course, was unknowable. But it was important to address the issue of succession. Every large organization or business had a responsibility to make sure there was a process for finding the very best. And in 2018, Mattis believed, the commander in chief had failed and let the country down.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:52 pm

Mattis later described for others what it was like to attend meetings with Trump: “It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it could go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him.

“So you just had to deal with it. He’d been voted in. And our job was not to take a political or partisan position. It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?”

Mattis frequently used a phrase coined by George Kennan, the father of the doctrine to contain the Soviet Union: “the treacherous curtain of deference” that comes down when someone is around high-level officials, especially presidents.

In Trump’s case, there were additional impediments to connecting and communicating with the president. Mattis said beyond that sense of “Oh my gosh, I’m in the Oval Office,” advisers had to push past “the additional curtains of Fox News, of his formative years. Those are long-held beliefs. So those were the real curtains. Because I saw Rex Tillerson and Dan Coats and Mike Pompeo at CIA and certainly Gina Haspel, myself, quite willing to come up with the facts. Joe Dunford never hesitated on it.” Neither did H. R. McMaster or Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“But the facts would be dismissed, and we’d be off on one of those ramps that circled around and started going. And then you’re sitting there, and it’s not deference at that point. It’s grasping for a way to get it back on subject. And it was just very hard. And there wasn’t a lot of time for it.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:54 pm

At 5:21 p.m. Trump tweeted: “General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February… General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations… I greatly thank Jim for his service!”

But three days later, Trump said that Mattis would be leaving early, on January 1. At a cabinet meeting the next day, Trump said, “What’s he done for me? How has he done in Afghanistan? Not so good. I’m not happy with what he’s done in Afghanistan and I shouldn’t be happy.”

Trump continued, “As you know, President Obama fired him, and essentially so did I.” Later he called Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.”

When I asked Trump about Mattis a year later, the president said Mattis was “just a PR guy.”

Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:56 pm

Kushner said he had developed this conclusion about Trump’s famously frequent reversals and changes of mind: “With the president, there’s a hundred different shades of gray. And if people try to get a quick answer out of him, it’s easy. You can get him to decide in your favor by limiting his information. But you better be sure as hell that people with competing views aren’t going to find their way to him. And when that happens, he’s going undo his decision.”

This was an asset, as Kushner saw it: “He almost uses his ability to read people and keep people off balance as his best filter to determine when somebody is trying to pull something on him. He knows that he’s kind of the final funnel before a decision. He’s very good at kind of knowing when somebody is bullshitting him.”

In 2018, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan had a simple question: How do we get the president not to change his mind again?

Guys, Kushner said to the Republican leaders, shifting blame away from Trump, “it’s not that he changes his mind. It’s that he wasn’t staffed correctly. People weren’t giving him all the facts and so he found out different facts. So you can’t try to trick him into making a decision and then expect that he’ll hold to that decision.”

Kushner believed Trump’s mindset from his years in real estate was: “You make a deal. There’s still a lot of details to work out. So you could always change your mind if the details don’t fall into place.”

His solution: “Make sure that the president has all the information on the front end so that he doesn’t change his mind later.”

Where others saw fickleness or even lies, Kushner saw Trump’s constant, shifting inconsistency as a challenge to be met with an ever-adapting form of managing up. Incomplete information, inadequate staffing—the appearance of impulsive decision making was all someone else’s fault, according to Kushner.

John Kelly had a less flattering assessment. “Crazytown,” Kelly said.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by Mountaineer » Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:59 pm

What exactly is the service you believe you are providing us with all these ‘Rage’ posts?
DNA has its own language (code), and language requires intelligence. There is no known mechanism by which matter can give birth to information, let alone language. It is unreasonable to believe the world could have happened by chance.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:15 pm

Dan Coats launched the new year, 2019, with an updated National Intelligence Strategy and an old proposition: “This strategy is based on the core principle of seeking the truth and speaking the truth to our policymakers.”

The strategy warned about “weakening of the post-WWII international order and dominance of Western democratic ideals, increasingly isolationist tendencies in the West and shifts in the global economy.” It also decried “Russian efforts to increase its influence and authority” that “are likely to continue and may conflict with US goals and priorities in multiple regions.”

Coats’s “truths” were built on many of the old themes that Trump rejected.

A week after releasing the strategy, Coats gave his Worldwide Threat Assessment publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee on January 29. He identified climate change as a security threat. Russia’s relationship with China was “closer than it has been in many decades.” North Korea was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities.”

Coats said intelligence officials didn’t believe Iran was developing a nuclear weapon—a direct contradiction of one of Trump’s core national security arguments.

Everything he said was based fully on intelligence, but Coats could not have more conspicuously stuck his finger in the president’s eye.

Fred Fleitz, president of the Center for Security Policy, a right-leaning Washington think tank, appeared on Fox Business and suggested that Coats ought to be fired, saying the intelligence service “has simply evolved into a monster that is basically second-guessing the president all the time.” Lou Dobbs, host of the show Fleitz appeared on and Trump’s friend and supporter, tweeted Fleitz’s quote and suggestion.

The next day the White House canceled the daily intelligence briefing, the PDB. Trump tweeted:

“The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” He added, “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:20 pm

“Isn’t that great?” Trump said, now in a good mood. “Can you believe we’re doing this shit? Can you believe I’m here, president of the United States, and you’re here? Can you believe this shit? Isn’t it the greatest thing in the world?”

It was apparently his way of absorbing the reality that, after two years of Mueller, it seemed over.

Marine One flew so close to the Washington Monument it felt as though they could almost touch it.

As the helicopter approached the White House grounds, a throng of journalists waited.

“There are the animals,” Trump said. “They’re the most heartbroken people in America.”

“Yeah, be easy on them,” Graham replied. “This is a bad day for them.” Graham recommended Trump be brief in his comments to the reporters. “Here’s my two cents,” Graham said. Say something like, “America’s the greatest country on earth. Good night.” He added, “If you’ll say that and nothing else, they’ll all fall over dead.”

Marine One landed at 7:04 p.m. Trump walked onto the South Lawn, looked directly at the cameras and said: “I just want to tell you that America is the greatest place on earth. The greatest place on earth. Thank you very much. Thank you.” And he walked away.

When Graham got home, his phone was ringing.

“Did you see them?” Trump said.

“Who?” Graham replied.

“The animals,” Trump said.

“No.”

“When I said that, they all were stunned. They were speechless. The first time in my life nobody asked me 120 questions,” Trump said. “That was the perfect thing to say.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:34 pm

Coats said he needed some guidance. He did not have to tell Mattis that the current situation was untenable. This is not at all what I came here to do, Coats said. He felt depleted.

“I haven’t spoken out,” Mattis commiserated. He had maintained his silence since his resignation in December. “I’ve made my case before the president. He listened. In the end he just didn’t agree with me.” Trump’s disdain for the allies and decision to pull out of Syria with no warning, no consultation, had been Mattis’s red line. “I’ve buried too many boys. That was a terrible decision.”

Coats said the mounting personal tensions between him and Trump and their fundamental differences on the nature of the security threats were debilitating.

“This is not good,” Mattis said. “Maybe at some point we’re going to have to stand up and speak out. There may be a time when we have to take collective action.”

“Well, possibly,” Coats said. “Yeah, there may.”

“He’s dangerous,” Mattis said. “He’s unfit.”

Speaking out didn’t seem to work, Coats said. Admiral Bill McRaven, who had led Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, had continuously mounted an aggressive, personal and public criticism of Trump. In an open letter to Trump published in The Washington Post in August 2018 after Trump revoked John Brennan’s security clearance, McRaven had written that the president had “embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.” He challenged Trump to revoke his security clearance: “I would consider it an honor.”

McRaven, a Navy SEAL, was one of the most celebrated military figures, a warrior scholar, bestselling author and now chancellor of the University of Texas system.

Trump had blasted back, calling McRaven “a Hillary Clinton fan” and suggested he should have captured bin Laden earlier. As best Coats could tell, McRaven’s gutsy stand seemed to have had no impact.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:36 pm

Mattis said they still had to consider stepping forward.

“Jim, what would that be?” Coats asked.

“I don’t know,” Mattis replied, “but we can’t let the country keep going” on this course. He repeated, “This is dangerous.”

“Look,” Coats said, “others have tried and it’s had no impact whatsoever. They get tarred and feathered.”

“What would make a difference?” Mattis asked.

“If the Senate stood up,” Coats said. He knew the Senate intimately, especially the Republicans. He had served 16 years as a Republican senator. And he kept in touch with half a dozen Republican senators who were friends. None were bailing on Trump—not out of conviction, but for political survival. “The Senate’s not going to stand up.”

But Coats pursued the question with some of his old friends from the Senate.

“I bet you have some interesting conversations in closed session,” Coats said to one senator.

“Yes, we sure do,” said the senator.

Others expressed the same view, and Coats realized nobody in the Senate needed to be told what was happening. They knew. The senators just desperately wanted to get past the November 3 election. If he was still in the Senate, Coats believed the worst course of action would be not to speak up, lose the Senate majority and lose your reputation. He believed the Senate had not fulfilled its obligation under the Constitution to be a check and balance. There should be a moment to demand accountability from Trump.

Should Trump be reelected, Coats hoped one Republican senator would lead the charge and insist on a change in the way decisions were made in the interactions with the president.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by flyingpylon » Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:49 pm

Mountaineer wrote:
Tue Sep 15, 2020 5:59 pm
What exactly is the service you believe you are providing us with all these ‘Rage’ posts?
Copyright infringement, I guess.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:05 pm

Three days after the call, Sunday, July 28, was golf day. Trump played 18 holes in the morning at his Trump National Club in Northern Virginia. It was a sweltering midsummer day.

After playing, he stopped in the clubhouse and ran into Dan Coats and his wife, Marsha. Members of the club, they were having lunch before a scheduled tee time later in the afternoon.

Trump seemed taken aback, although he knew they were members. Marsha, a trained psychologist, had a feeling something was going on. The look on Trump’s face was one of guilt and dismay, she thought.

Surprise, thought Dan Coats.

About an hour later, the Coatses were playing the long, straight 508-yard, par-four fourth hole, when a member of Coats’s security team came running up. Your chief of staff, Viraj Mirani, wants to talk to you.

The New York Times just released a story saying that Trump has replaced you, Mirani told Coats.

On the sixth hole—a 583-yard, par-five—Coats read Trump’s 4:45 p.m. tweet: “I am pleased to announce that highly respected Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas will be nominated by me to be the Director of National Intelligence… Dan Coats, the current director, will be leaving office on August 15th. I would like to thank Dan for his great service to our Country.”

Coats and Trump had never set a date for his departure. Coats had hoped to stay until September to wrap up some pending decisions. Where did August 15 come from, he wondered.

Later, when it became public that a whistleblower in the intelligence community was alleging improper conduct by Trump, Marsha Coats concluded that Trump or someone around him didn’t want her husband to be the one to receive the report. She believed Trump wanted Coats out because he would have turned the whistleblower report over to Congress rather than protect the president.

Ratcliffe was an ardent Trump supporter, but was forced to drop out following news reports that he had exaggerated his role prosecuting terrorism cases as a U.S. attorney. Trump eventually renominated Ratcliffe, who was confirmed and assumed office in 2020. The whistleblower report was eventually made public.

The linkage between the withheld aid, which in the end totaled about $400 million, and Trump’s request for an investigation into the Bidens ultimately led the House of Representatives to impeach Trump.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:05 pm

On February 27 and 28, 2019, the North Korea–United States summit was held in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The two sides had intended to hold a signing ceremony on the last day, but the meeting fell apart.

Trump and Kim spent two hours together with their respective staffs.

News reports following the abrupt ending said Kim had offered to dismantle the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center—the nation’s major nuclear weapons facility, located in the far north—but he would not go far enough in offering to dismantle other, more active facilities as well. And while Trump was prepared to undo some economic sanctions, the reports said, he was not prepared to fully lift five rounds of sanctions that had been devastating for the North Korean economy.

Trump had his own version of events in Hanoi, as he related to me: Almost from the start, Trump said, he instinctively knew Kim wasn’t ready to get where he needed him to go.

Kim was ready to give up one of his nuclear sites, but he had five.

“Listen, one doesn’t help and two doesn’t help and three doesn’t help and four doesn’t help,” Trump said. “Five does help.”

“But it’s our biggest,” Kim said, referring to the Yongbyon center.

“Yeah, it’s also your oldest,” Trump said. “Because I know every one of the sites. I know all of them, better than any of my people I know them. You understand that.”

Kim would not budge from his position.

“Do you ever do anything other than send rockets up to the air?” Trump asked Kim. “Let’s go to a movie together. Let’s go play a round of golf.”

Finally, the reality set in.

“You’re not ready to make a deal,” Trump said to Kim. “You’re not there.”

“What do you mean?” The look on Kim’s face was utter shock.

“You’re not ready to make a deal,” Trump said. “I’ve got to leave. You’re my friend. I think you’re a wonderful guy. But we’ve got to leave, because you’re not ready to make a deal.”

Trump’s implied message, Pompeo thought, was: Don’t shoot. We’re friends. We can trust each other. We will work it out.

The summit was reported as a failure.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:30 pm

More than a month later, August 5, Kim wrote Trump the longest letter exchanged between the two.

The tone was polite. But the message was that relations between Kim and Trump may have cooled off for good. It sounded like a disappointed friend or lover.

Kim thanked Trump for the pictures of their meeting at the border. “I’m delighted to receive each and every single picture you specifically chose from that day, which holds special meaning and will remain an eternal memory from that momentous and historic day,” he wrote. “Those photographs now hang in my office. I express my appreciation to you, and I will remember that moment forever.”

But Kim was upset, he said, because military exercises by the U.S.–South Korea alliance had not fully stopped.

“My belief was that the provocative combined military exercises would either be cancelled or postponed ahead of our two countries’ working-level negotiations where we would continue to discuss important matters,” Kim wrote. “Against whom is the combined military exercises taking place in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, who are they trying to block, and who are they intended to defeat and attack?”

He continued: “Conceptually and hypothetically, the main target of the war preparatory exercises is our own military. This is not our misunderstanding…

“As if to support our view, a few days ago the person who they call the minister of national defense of South Korea said that the modernization of our conventional commercial weapons was deemed a ‘provocation’ and a ‘threat’ and that if we continue to ‘provoke’ and ‘threaten’ they will classify my administration and military as an ‘enemy.’ Now and in the future, South Korean military cannot be my enemy. As you mentioned at some point, we have a strong military without the need of special means, and the truth is that South Korean military is no match against my military.”

Kim said he did not like the U.S. military’s role. “The thing I like even less is that the US military is engaged in these paranoid and hypersensitive actions with the South Korean people.

“I am clearly offended and I do not want to hide this feeling from you. I am really, very offended,” the letter continued. “Your Excellency, I am immensely proud and honored that we have a relationship where I can send and receive such candid thoughts with you.”

In remarks on the South Lawn of the White House on August 9, Trump spontaneously brought up Kim’s latest letter when answering a reporter’s question on a different topic. While Kim’s letter warned Trump had offended him, the president turned it on its head.

“I got a very beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un yesterday,” Trump said. “It was a very positive letter.”

“What did it say?” a reporter asked.

“I’d love to give it to you,” Trump said. “I really would. Maybe—maybe sometime I will.”

The CIA never figured out conclusively who wrote and crafted Kim’s letters to Trump. They were masterpieces. The analysts marveled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being center stage in history.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:44 pm

“But it’s still a dangerous relationship,” I said. “Would you agree?”

“Yeah,” Trump said, “but it’s less dangerous than it was. Because he likes me. I like him. We get along. That doesn’t mean I’m naive. That doesn’t mean that I think, oh, it’s going to be wonderful. He’s a very tough cookie. And he is smart, very smart.”

“You’re convinced he’s smart?”

“Beyond smart. Look, he took over, when he was 27 years old, a volatile place where the people are very smart. Same as South Korea. They’re the same. Okay? Same people. Very smart.”

Trump did not dispute that Kim was also violent and vicious. He said that Kim “tells me everything. Told me everything. I know everything about him. He killed his uncle and he put the body right in the steps where the senators walked out. And the head was cut, sitting on the chest. Think that’s tough? You know, they think politics in this country’s tough.”

The president continued, “Nancy Pelosi said, oh, let’s impeach him. You think that’s tough? This is tough. These are great pictures.” He pointed at one of the pictures. “Look, did you ever see him smile? Did you ever see him smile before?”


“So, hard question, President Trump,” I said. “I understand we really came close to war with North Korea.”

“Right. Much closer than anyone would know. Much closer. You know. He knows it better than anybody,” he said, referring to Kim.

“Did you tell him?”

“I don’t want to tell you that. But he knows. I have a great relationship, let me just put it that way. But we’ll see what happens.” He noted that for two years North Korea had not conducted nuclear or intercontinental ballistic missile tests. The last ICBM test by North Korea had been in November 2017.

“I can’t tell you what the end is going to be yet, how it’s going to end,” Trump said. “He’s tested short-range missiles. Which, by the way, every country has short-range missiles. There’s no country that doesn’t have them. Okay? It’s not a big deal. That doesn’t mean after January he’s not going to be doing some things. We’ll see what it is. But I have a great relationship.”

Many foreign policy figures had said that Trump gave Kim too much by agreeing to meet without formal, written conditions. “So have you given Kim too much power?” I asked. Kim had said he wouldn’t shoot more ICBMs. “Because if he’s defiant, if he shoots one of those ICBMs, what are you going to do, sir?”

“If he shoots, he shoots,” Trump said. “And then he’s got big problems, let me put it that way. Big, big problems. Bigger than anybody’s ever had before.”

Then Trump digressed to reveal something extraordinary—a secret new weapons system. “I have built a nuclear—a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody—what we have is incredible.”

Later I found sources who confirmed the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system but no one wanted to provide details and were surprised Trump had disclosed it. Trump had asked for and received massive funding increases for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile, since taking office.

Trump told me all he gave Kim was a meeting. “You look, look at the good picture. He’s having a good time. You know? Nobody’s ever seen him smile. Look. Look at him smiling. He’s happy. He feels happy.”

“Did you think it’s kind of Nixon to China,” I asked, referring to President Nixon’s opening to China in 1972.

“No, I don’t want to even talk about Nixon to China. I think Nixon to China—I think China’s been a horrible thing for this country. Horrible because we’ve allowed them” to become an economic powerhouse.

The military always tells you the alliances with NATO and South Korea are the best bargain the United States makes, I noted, a great investment in joint defense.

“The military people are wrong,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t say they were stupid, because I would never say that about our military people. But if they said that, they—whoever said that was stupid. It’s a horrible bargain. We’re protecting South Korea from North Korea, and they’re making a fortune with televisions and ships and everything else. Right? They make so much money. Costs us $10 billion. We’re suckers.”

It costs the United States approximately $4.5 billion annually to station troops in South Korea, $920 million of which is paid by the South Korean government.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:52 pm

“There is anger out there” in the country, I said. “And the question is, you’re sitting here in the Oval Office. Why? Why all that anger?”

“Okay,” the president said, “I think it’s for a number of reasons. But before I agree to even answer that question, okay? I have to say this: There’s also many Democrats that silently will vote for me. And it happened last time. The Obama Democrats that came out—I was going to say Barack Hussein, but I figured I wouldn’t say that today, because I want to keep this very nice. The Obama Democrats who came out and they voted for me, and it was a tremendous percentage. And the Bernie Sanders Democrats, they voted for me.”

Exit polls showed about 9 percent of those who identified as Democrats voted for Trump in 2016, and about 7 percent of those who identified as Republicans voted for Clinton.

I raised former President Obama and said that many thought he was smart.

“I don’t know. I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump said. “See? I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker. Oh, he’s so—hey look. I went to the best schools. I did great. I had an uncle who was a professor at MIT for 40 years, one of the most respected in the history of the school. For 40 years. My father’s brother. And my father was smarter than he was. It’s good stock. You know they talk about the elite. Really, the elite. Ah, they have nice houses. No. I have much better than them. I have better everything than them, including education.”

“This is an important moment in history,” I said, “where they’re going to impeach you, the House is going to impeach you.”

“Yeah.”

“And we’re sitting in the Oval Office here. And you are content, happy, proud.”

“Yeah.”

“Any angst?”

“No.”

The deputy press secretary interrupted, saying, “We’ve got about five minutes, gentlemen.” The treasury secretary was waiting.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Trump said. “Go ahead. I find it interesting. I love this guy. Even though he writes shit about me. That’s okay.”

“What’s the Trump-Pence strategy to win over, in the next 11 months, the persuadable voter?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Trump said. “You know what? I’ll tell you what the Trump-Pence strategy is: To do a good job. That’s all it is. It’s very simple. It’s not a—I don’t have a strategy. I do a good job.”

“Why don’t you give me your taxes?” I asked. “No, seriously.”

He cited his standard argument that his tax returns were being audited by the IRS, although I knew that would not stop him from releasing his taxes if he wanted.

“Do you know what I made last year?” Trump asked. “Four hundred and eighty-eight million or something like that. I made four hundred and eighty-eight—and that’s because I’m not there. Meaning I would have done much better. Four eighty-eight.”

Trump reported at least $434 million in income in 2018, according to his financial disclosure form filed with the Office of Government Ethics in May 2019.

I noted the split-screen effect of the impeachment debate in the House and this discussion in the Oval Office. I knew it was a big show. He had all his props on the Resolute Desk: the parchment appointment orders of the judges stacked in the middle of the desk, the large rolls of pictures of him and Kim, and a binder with letters from Kim. I had interviewed Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama in the Oval Office. All sat in the standard presidential seat by the fireplace and did not have props.

“It’s as if you had won the biggest lottery ever,” I said.

“I did. Every day I won it. Nancy Pelosi has driven my poll numbers through the roof. And she comes out with, I pray for our president. She never prayed for me in her life.”

“Okay. In a sentence, what’s the job of the president? What is your job as you see it?

“I have many jobs.”

I offered my standard definition. “I think it’s figuring out what the next stage of good is for a majority of people in the country—”

“That’s good,” Trump said.

“—and then saying,” I continued, “this is where we’re going, and this is the plan to get there.”

“Correct,” Trump said. “But sometimes that road changes. You know, a lot of people are inflexible. Sometimes a road has to change, you know? You have a wall in front and you have to go around it instead of trying to go through it—it’s much easier. But really the job of a president is to keep our country safe, to keep it prosperous. Okay? Prosperous is a big thing. But sometimes you have so much prosperity that people want to use that in a bad way, and you have to be careful with it.”

As I listened, I was struck by the vague, directionless nature of Trump’s comments. He had been president for just under three years, but couldn’t seem to articulate a strategy or plan for the country. I was surprised he would go into 2020, the year he hoped to win reelection, without more clarity to his message.

“By the way, could I ask you a question?” Trump inquired. He wanted to know who I thought would get the Democratic nomination for president.

I had a terrible track record on such predictions and took a pass. “Who do you think is going to be your opponent?” I asked.

“I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s a terrible group of candidates,” Trump said. “It’s an embarrassment. I’m embarrassed by the Democrat candidates. I may have to run against one, and who knows? It’s an election. And I’m looking pretty good right now.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:38 pm

Trump said he told Kim when it came to denuclearization, “I know every one of your sites better than any of my people.” He reminded me again of his late uncle, Dr. John Trump, a physicist who taught electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1983. “He was at MIT for 42 years or something. He was a great—so I understand that stuff. You know, genetically.”

Trump continued, “The top person at MIT came to the office about a year ago. Brought me a whole package on Dr. John Trump. He said he was one of the greatest men. He was brilliant. I get that stuff.”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:39 pm

We ping-ponged between a few more subjects and landed on Afghanistan. Trump’s generals had resisted his desire to withdraw U.S. troops from the 19-year war. “So the first thing the generals tell you when you want to pull out, they say, Sir, I’d rather fight them over there than fight them over here. And if you’re sitting behind this beautiful desk, the Resolute Desk, and you have four guys that look like they’re right out of Hollywood saying, yes, sir—they’ll do whatever you say. I say, what’s your opinion, General? Sir, I’d rather fight them over there than fight them over here. I’ve had four generals say almost the exact same words. That’s a hard line if you’re sitting here and you have to make that decision, when you have guys that you respect making that statement.”

Trump continued, “But I then say, well, does this mean we’re going to be there for the next 100 years?”
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:52 pm

Redfield was beyond frustration. Each day counted. On January 6 he converted his January 4 email word-for-word to a formal letter to Gao on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services letterhead. Redfield figured the formal letter would give Gao some ammunition with his superiors. The Chinese sat on it.

Redfield pinged Gao through the U.S. embassy in Beijing asking if there was a response. Can we come to China? The answer came back: Thanks again for the offer.

What’s going on? Redfield complained to Fauci. They weren’t getting a yes and they weren’t getting a no. From his past relationship with Gao, he did not expect this. He tried everything to get an affirmative invitation. Nothing.

They were at the most critical stage. He needed on-the-ground data.

One explanation, Redfield and Fauci agreed, was that the Chinese are proud, with sophisticated medical doctors and equipment, and probably felt they didn’t need help from anybody else. Fauci threw up his hands. Here we go again. China being China—remote, aloof
and secretive. Since they knew of no cases of the strange pneumonia in the United States, it would be hard to press much harder.
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Re: Rage by Bob Woodard

Post by vnatale » Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:53 pm

The CDC Situational Report for January 13 alerted readers that “Thailand reported a confirmed case of nCoV in a traveler from Wuhan City to Thailand. This is the first infection with novel coronavirus 2019 detected outside China.”

That report hit Redfield hard. It told him, almost for sure, that there was human-to-human spread and the disease was being carried outside China.

Meanwhile, Redfield had another phone conversation with Gao. You can’t believe what’s going on over here, Gao said. It’s much, much worse than you’re hearing.

Holy shit, Fauci said. They haven’t been telling us the truth. It is really transmitting efficiently.

The CDC began developing a diagnostic test and issuing warnings for airports and ports of entry to the U.S. about travelers from Wuhan. It held a call with over 300 attendees from state and local health departments in the U.S.

On January 15, the CDC Situational Report hedged, saying:

“Some limited human-to-human spread may have occurred.… The possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low.”
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