Rage

by Bob Woodward

  Later that day at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it.” He called Democrats’ criticism of his handling of the virus “their new hoax,” after the Russian investigation and impeachment, and their “single talking point.”

  * * *

  Fauci, who was fast becoming the most recognizable face of U.S. government’s coronavirus response, appeared on the Today show on February 29.

  NBC reporter Peter Alexander asked the question on many people’s minds: “So, Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America. People are waking up right now with real concerns about this. They want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits and, if so, how?”

  “No,” Fauci said. “Right now, at this moment, there’s no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis. Right now the risk is still low, but this could change.”

  He was later glad he had added “but this could change.” Yet as a practical matter, America’s Doctor had given the green light to proceed with the weekend routine.

  * * *

  That same day, health officials announced the first U.S. death from Covid-19 had occurred overnight in Washington State. At the Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the White House that afternoon, Redfield said of the deceased, “The investigation at this time shows no evidence of link to travel or a known contact.”

  Asked by a reporter whether Americans should change their routines or daily lives, Trump said, “Well, I hope they don’t change their routine. But maybe, Anthony,” he said to Fauci, “I’ll let you—I’ll let you answer that. Or Bob?” he asked Redfield. “Do you want to answer that? Please.”

  “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives,” Redfield said. “The risk is low. We need to go on with our normal lives.”

  I. The next day, February 7, 2020, I talked with Trump. He knew a surprising amount about the virus and said in the presidency “there’s dynamite behind every door.” See prologue.

  THIRTY-THREE

  While in college more than 55 years ago, I knew an English professor who understood how elusive biography can be. The biographer, he argued, must find the true “reflectors” of a subject, the people who know the person as well as anyone. The ideal reflector enjoys a unique closeness personally and professionally with the subject, has vast experience with them, and can make a character assessment.

  When I first heard about Jared Kushner, he seemed to worship his father-in-law, acting as an ever-loyal cheerleader and true believer. He once told associates, “When I disagree with the president, I always say, okay, what am I missing? Because he’s proven time and time again to have good instincts.”

  He expressed awe at Trump’s dominance of the media. “If the president didn’t tweet it, it didn’t happen. You send out a press release and it goes into the ether and nobody cares. He puts out a tweet and it’s on CNN one and a half minutes later.”

  Initially I thought all of this meant Kushner would not be able to come close to sharing an honest character assessment of Trump.

  Then on February 8, 2020, Kushner advised others on the four texts that he said someone in a quest to understand Trump needed to absorb.

  First, Kushner advised, go back and read a 2018 opinion column by The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Peggy Noonan. Her column on Trump said: “He’s crazy… and it’s kind of working.”

  Kushner made it clear that his endorsement of the column was not an aside or stray comment, but was central to understanding Trump.

  The son-in-law had to know that Noonan’s column, dated March 8, 2018, and titled “Over Trump, We’re As Divided As Ever,” was not positive. Rather it was quite devastating. In it she called Trump a “circus act” and “a living insult.”

  “What you feel is disquiet,” she wrote, “and you know what it’s about: the worrying nature of Mr. Trump himself… epic instability, mismanagement and confusion.”

  A conservative speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, Noonan wrote that with Trump, “We are not talking about being colorfully, craftily unpredictable, as political masters like FDR and Reagan sometimes were, but something more unfortunate, an unhinged or not-fully-hinged quality that feels like screwball tragedy.”

  Warming to her theme, Noonan wrote, “Crazy doesn’t last. Crazy doesn’t go the distance. Crazy is an unstable element that, when let loose in an unstable environment, explodes. And so your disquiet. Sooner or later something bad will happen.… It all feels so dangerous.

  “Expecting more from the president of the United States springs from respect for the country, its institutions and the White House itself. It springs from standards, the falling of which concerns natural conservatives. It isn’t snobbery. The people trying to wrap their heads around this presidency are patriots too. That’s one of the hellish things about this era.”

  Kushner’s second recommendation for understanding Trump was, surprisingly, the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. He paraphrased the cat: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” The Cheshire Cat’s strategy was one of endurance and persistence, not direction.

  Kushner was explicitly saying Alice in Wonderland was a guiding text for the Trump presidency. Did Kushner understand how negative this was? Was it possible the best roadmap for the administration was a novel about a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole, and Kushner was willing to acknowledge that Trump’s presidency was on shaky, directionless ground?

  The third text Kushner recommended for understanding the Trump presidency was Chris Whipple’s book The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. In the book, Whipple concluded that, after the president, the chiefs of staff held the fate of the country in their hands.

  In a chapter on the Trump presidency added in March 2018, Whipple wrote that Trump “clearly had no idea how to govern” in his first year in office, yet was reluctant to follow the advice of his first two chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and John Kelly. “What seems clear, as of this writing and almost a year into his presidency, is that Trump will be Trump, no matter his chief of staff,” Whipple concluded.

  A fourth text Kushner advised was necessary to understand Trump was Scott Adams’s book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, explains in Win Bigly that Trump’s misstatements of fact are not regrettable errors or ethical lapses, but part of a technique called “intentional wrongness persuasion.” Adams argues Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues, and “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.”

  Kushner said that Scott Adams’s approach could be applied to Trump’s recent February 4 State of the Union speech when he had claimed, “Our economy is the best it has ever been.” The economy was indeed in excellent shape then, but not the best in history, Kushner acknowledged.

  “Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. This was his core understanding of communication strategy in the age of the internet and Trump. A controversy over the economy, Kushner argued—and how good it is—only helps Trump because it reminds voters that the economy is good. A hair-splitting, fact-checking debate in the media about whether the numbers were technically better decades ago or in the 1950s is irrelevant, he said.

  When combined, Kushner’s four texts painted President Trump as crazy, aimless, stubborn and manipulative. I could hardly believe anyone would recommend these as ways to understand their father-in-law, much less the president they believed in and served.

  * * *

  Kushner had no official title during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign but had made many operational decisions—especially on costs, which he knew Trump constantly monitored. Now Kushner played a major role in the 2020 reelection campaign, one he called “a perfect,
well-oiled machine” in contrast to the “experimental” 2016 run.

  For 2020, Kushner said in February to others, “I set up three polling operations.” They are independent of each other, he added. “The polling just shows time and time again, the president’s doing great. We have the ability for a big blowout in 2020.”

  The House impeachment vote by Democrats, which Kushner called “so unfair,” had been a bonanza for Trump’s job approval ratings.

  “We picked up eight points. We pounded the shit out of them,” Kushner said of the Democrats. Eight points could be debated, but it did seem clear that the impeachment had given Trump a boost. A Gallup poll released on February 4 showed Trump’s job approval rating had reached 49 percent, the highest of his presidency.

  The real story of Trump’s presidency, in Kushner’s stated view, was the perception of Trump versus the reality. “You should see him in meetings. He interrogates people, keeps them off balance, but he will bend.

  “The media is hysterical about Trump—so hysterical they can’t be a check on him,” Kushner argued. “Reporters are afraid to break the line on Trump’s dysfunction. And if they do, they will be ostracized.”

  Earlier in February, the president had told me “there’s dynamite behind every door.” Trump, of course, had his worries, but Kushner dismissed to others the idea that trouble loomed. He would not even acknowledge this possibility. He had boundless confidence and was upbeat.

  Trouble always loomed in the presidency. Wasn’t surprise everywhere? The unexpected lurked around any corner, any day, every day. Wasn’t it right and wise for any president to think defensively that there was dynamite behind every door?

  For example, President George W. Bush’s Top Secret President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001, had included the memorable headline: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Not much or enough had been done. Thirty-six days later, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group had struck in New York City and Washington, killing 3,000 people and changing the course of history.

  But Kushner was an optimist. Trump, he said, “has walked through many doors with dynamite” and survived. “He has mastered the presidency like never before.”

  He summarized, “The president has pushed the boundaries, yes. He’s not done the normal thing. But it was the right thing for people. Everything is on track for the big blowout.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Kushner was by turns frustrated and bemused by other people’s confusion about Trump. “He’s unpredictable, which is a great strength. Nobody knows where that line is” that Trump won’t cross. According to Kushner, Trump himself does not know. “This is the difference between a businessperson and politician, in the sense that every day the facts change. And so the line changes too.”

  This was often underscored by a cynical cost-benefit analysis. For instance, in December 2016, prior to taking office, Trump had questioned whether his administration would continue the “One China” policy that the U.S. has held since the Carter administration. Under the policy, the United States does not recognize the island of Taiwan as an independent nation and instead acknowledges only “One China” that includes Taiwan. Trump’s decision to cast doubt on the policy angered China, and in a February 9, 2017, phone call with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Trump said he would honor it. Two months later, he welcomed Xi to Mar-a-Lago for a summit.

  Kushner cast the “One China” decision as one of cynical pragmatism. “President Trump would say that he was going to respect the One China policy,” Kushner said. “That wasn’t that big of a give, because you could always say you wouldn’t respect it a day later.”

  Kushner had additional explanations for Trump’s fluctuations. “The hardest thing that people have in understanding him is they see him as fixed, where he’s actually, he’s not a solid, he’s fluid in the sense that—and that’s a strength.” Trump’s background in business had taught him “there’s no deal until you sign on the line. Right? You can make a deal and then you go through it. But until the paper is signed, it’s not a deal. And that’s how he is. And so he’ll always be flexible.”

  Of course flexibility can be a strength, in business and politics. But Trump’s staff and cabinet rarely got a clear definition of direction or policy from the president until he decided or tweeted. Believing that “every day the facts change” is simply another version of Kellyanne Conway’s 2017 statement that there are “alternative facts.”

  “He’s not afraid to step into a controversial situation,” Kushner said. “I think he’s shown over time he’s built up his courage to do it. Because he’s stepped into a lot of situations where people said if you do this the world’s going to end, and then the next morning the sun rises, the next evening the sun sets.”

  * * *

  By early 2020, Kushner thought Trump had assembled a better and more dedicated White House team than they’d had before.

  “In the beginning,” Kushner told others, referring to the first years of the administration, “20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump.

  “Now, I think we have the inverse. I think 80 of the people working for him think that he’s saving the world, and 20 percent—maybe less now—think they’re saving the world from Trump.”

  Let that analysis sink in: Twenty percent of the president’s staff think they are “saving the world” from the president.

  Kushner suggested that Trump had developed a new appreciation for some of the people who had been with him since the beginning of his administration. As the economic tasks of 2020 grew and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin played a larger and larger role, Kushner told the president, “This is when you’ll really appreciate having the neurotic New York Jews around.”

  * * *

  Kushner said one of Trump’s greatest strengths was “he somehow manages to have his enemies self-destruct and make stupid mistakes. He’s just able to play the media like a fiddle, and the Democrats too. They run like dogs after a fire truck, chasing whatever he throws out there. And then he solves the problem and does the next—then they go on to the next thing.”

  The question was, he said, “What is the media obsessed with at a different moment? Because they’ve been melting down about something every day for as long as I’ve been in this politics business, for a couple of years. And then what’s really happening? It’s like a buffet where they’ll always eat the worst thing you give them.”

  In meetings, Kushner said, Trump was “an expert at cross-examination. He’s an expert at reading people’s tells. He won’t say, let me go with a nuanced position. He’ll, in a meeting, say, well, what if we do 100? They’ll say, oh, you can’t do that. And then, he’ll say, well, what if we do zero? It’s like, holy shit. It’s whiplash. So that’s his way of reading people, is to see how certain are they of their position: Do they hold their ground? Do they buckle? So that’s just his style.

  “And by the way,” Kushner added, “that’s why the most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots.” It was apparently a reference to Mattis, Tillerson and former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn. All had left. “If you look at the evolution over time, we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the overconfident idiots. And now he’s got a lot more thoughtful people who kind of know their place and know what to do.”

  * * *

  According to Kushner, one of Trump’s greatest impacts was on the Republican Party. “Neither party is really a party. They’re collections of tribes,” he observed at one White House meeting. “The Republican Party was a collection of a bunch of tribes. Look at the Republican Party platform. It’s a document meant to piss people off, basically, because it’s done by activists.” Kushner’s theory was there was a “disproportionality between what issues people are vocal on and what the people, the voters, really care about.”

  Trump had united the Republican Party behind himself. “I don’t think it’s even about the issues,” Kushner
said. “I think it’s about the attitude.” He said Trump “did a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

  * * *

  Construction of the wall along the Mexico-U.S. border, paid for by the government of Mexico, was a central tenet of Trump’s 2016 campaign and first on Kushner’s list of things Trump needed to accomplish to win reelection in 2020. Mexico refused to pay, and five days after his inauguration, Trump had signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to identify and allocate all possible sources of federal funding. A DHS report said the wall would cost over $20 billion.

  In the fall of 2019, Trump made Kushner the boss of the border wall. Kushner’s approach was straight out of business school, with meticulous files and charts and review meetings every two weeks.

  At one meeting on February 14, 2020, Kushner gathered 15 people and walked through a series of questions: Do we have the contracts for each section of the wall? Were they on time? What decisions needed to be made? Where were the bottlenecks? How to get costs down? Where was the money coming from—which Pentagon account? What’s the feedback from the people on the ground?

  By Kushner’s calculations, they had built 121.4 miles of wall. But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said 99 miles of that was “new border wall system constructed in place of dilapidated and/or outdated designs”—in other words, replacement or repair. Ten miles were “secondary border wall.” One mile was of new wall “in locations where no wall previously existed.” Kushner’s goal was to build, replace or repair seven to eight miles a week and reach 400 miles by the end of the year. It wouldn’t be complete yet, so they would be building the wall into 2021—presuming Trump was reelected. The hardest part was buying land.