Those who read Rage now will get some sense of the hectic and turbulent nature of decision-making within the White House. Acceptance of how far we have fallen would have meant not only reappraising the country many of them loved but also the Party many of them belonged to. there is such a thing as too much access: chapter after chapter shows Trump ignoring questions and ranting about the media, Obama, and his poll numbers. Whether Woodward and his sources are aware or disengaged, cynical or naïve, takes on extra importance because of the unique challenges and outrages of our era, in which a willingness to abide Trump has sat side by side with an inability to understand his malignancy. What is so hard to decipher about these early sections is to what extent Mattis, Tillerson, and Coats were as naïve as Woodward portrays them, to what extent they feigned cluelessness in order to justify their willingness to work for Trump, and to what extent their depictions are Woodward’s own infantilizing spin, intended to create bildungsromans out of the lives of men in their sixties and seventies. typical of Woodward’s White House-centric narratives: inconsistencies pile up narrative threads are dropped and then recovered without any notice of the ways in which they have altered in the interim.
Woodward is adept at getting people to trust him and talk on the record, including Trump himself. Judging Rage on its own terms, the book is an important contribution to documenting the Trump presidency. Rage provides additional firsthand evidence that since taking office Trump has posed a 'clear and present danger' to the people of the United States and beyond. Woodward, a daily newspaper reporter at heart, moves from one story to the next, spending little or no time offering any incisive analysis of these enablers. Woodward offers no analysis here, so readers are left to dwell on the tragedy of it all. 'Even people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing what he says.' That is the baffling reality of Trump’s presidency.
The willful blindness from which each suffered in accepting Trump’s appointments, and their failure to blow the whistle once they witnessed firsthand the damage Trump was causing our country, entitles each to his own chapter when Profiles in Complicity is written. These are painful chapters to read that will elicit rage in many readers. despite his 49 years reporting on Washington politics, 19 previous books, and two Pulitzer Prizes, Woodward comes off.as surprisingly naïve.
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