Rage
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4.2 • 1.2K Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Rage is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest.
Woodward, the #1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump’s head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans.
In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months—an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind—the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the “dynamite behind every door.”
At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president.
Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making.
Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents.
Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film.”
Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. Okay?” Trump told the author in July. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get to do another book. You’ll find I was right.”
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With his prolific Twitter presence and domineering style at the podium, it feels like we’ve got a pretty good sense of what Donald Trump is like as both a president and person. But veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward—who helped break the Watergate story—takes us deeper with his follow-up to Fear, based on a series of his extensive interviews with the commander in chief. We were astounded by Trump’s level of candour during the course of these conversations, including his headline-making admission that he chose to publicly downplay what he knew about the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump chats with Woodward as if they’re old friends, and Woodward makes the smart decision to let the president’s unedited words speak for themselves. After all, it’s this unfiltered approach that’s made Trump the most talked-about American on both sides of the political divide—and that’s exactly the reality that Woodward captures in Rage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Woodward's second collection is a poetic diary or day-to-day travelogue shaped by a rigid formal device: a continuous series of unpunctuated long sentences are set in five-word lines in three five-line stanzas per page with only occasional exceptions. Spoken in an endearing, companionable voice, these poems-or sections of a long poem-meditate on the most ordinary of daily happenings. The book begins mid-sentence with a gesture of assured intimacy: "in spite of which it's/hard to imagine it all going to shit." Woodward's sensitivity to line breaks and fondness for conjunctions keeps the rhythm lively. Rain becomes the central metaphor for the book and a shaping formal device:, "it's that/honest moment before the orchestra tunes itself/although much longer in duration/the instruments join in and/fall away as many times/as time will allow for/the droplets arrive at the/faces of you and me." Readers might wish for more of the mischievousness that occasionally graces the poems, but this book is impressively captivating, considering that nothing much happens. Woodward (Mister Goodbye Easter Island, 2003) notes that tulip petals, after a while, go "lazy and strange." He waits for his songs on the jukebox. He sees the kind of hubcaps that "continue/to spin when the car comes/to a stop." The people that appear here are rarely surprised and repeat versions of "the seven/ basic conversations." Each small detail is noticed, proclaimed, discussed and ultimately exalted.
Customer Reviews
I enjoyed it
I enjoyed this book and especially getting to read exactly what trump thinks and said off camera. Even though he knew it was being recorded. The author did a great job at reporting the info he received even though trump can be hard to follow.
The Book’s Title Reflects Woodward’s Mood
To finish a book with the assessment that Donald Trump is “the wrong man for the job,” Bob Woodward shifts from reasoned analyst to political polemicist. It’s not a shift that’s good for the nation.
Woodward had been one of the few remaining reporters on the planet. As the shift of the press to for-profit media organizations and now to click-driven revenue machines happened, there are fewer and fewer news reporting services. The combination of consumption of news through social media and the revenue drive of the highly profitable parent companies of media organizations has in large part killed news reporting.
Bob Woodward joins the clickbait generation of media, where malice is present in every headline and in most conclusions, because it drives more clicks and more social engagement.
The book doesn’t age well. While Woodward focuses on the president as his subject, he misses perhaps the largest story of his lifetime: the origin of the COVID-19 virus. Woodward interviews the players and had perhaps the most access, but never picked up on the culpability of Anthony Fauci and the US for funding experiments at the Wuhan lab.
Woodward never asked for, and Fauci certainly never offered, information about the lab in Wuhan, the gain of function tests that were being done, and the funding partner for those tests. Instead, Woodward wrote an apologist piece about the “grandfatherly” Fauci.
Yikes.
Well I knew Trump was mentally ill, this book reinforced it.
Glad he is out, we all know how he mismanagement this pandemic and so much more. The man is insane.