There’s a lot of buncombe in Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House.  Doubtless Chronicles readers heard some of it when the book was released on September 13, as the mainstream media played and replayed on the hour reports of Chief of Staff John Kelly allegedly grousing in the author’s presence that Trump’s “an idiot.  It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything.  He’s gone off the rails.  We’re in crazytown.”  We’re already familiar with Woodward’s style of “journalism.”  In Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-87, former CIA Director Bill Casey, dying of a stroke that had rendered him unable to speak, whispered “secrets” to the Washington Post author.

If we move beyond the headlines and reports about Fear, and dig deeper into what wasn’t reported by Woodward in the volume, we may discover what Trump has actually been doing.

Or not doing, as the case may be.  For starters, amid the gossipy quotations and intimate portraits presented as the fruit of two years of careful research, there is no evidence presented of “Russian collusion.”  The press failed to mention that.  The book contains many passages on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the matter, including the successful prosecutions of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and campaign honcho Paul Manafort for unrelated crimes.  But one would have to turn to a transcript of a publicity interview Woodward gave to Hugh Hewitt to hear any conclusive thoughts about the issue that has dogged the Trump administration from day one.

Hewitt: “Very last question, Bob Woodward, I just want to confirm, at the end of two years of writing this book, this intensive effort, you saw no effort, you, personally, had no evidence of collusion or espionage by the president presented to you?”

 

Woodward: “That is correct.”

Trade has been one of Trump’s signature issues.  He has repeatedly decried the fact that trade deals struck under previous administrations allowed other countries to leave barriers to U.S. goods in place, even as America had virtually no trade barriers and American jobs were being siphoned off by China, Japan, and South Korea.  Trump has used tariffs to send a message to these unfair trade partners, and has thus far made better deals with Canada, Mexico, and South Korea, with Europe and China on the horizon.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis and top economic advisor Gary Cohn vehemently opposed tariffs.  Woodward writes that they

had several quiet conversations about the Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. . . . 

 

One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of $500 billion harmed the American economy.  He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson insisted that this trade imbalance “is what’s kept the peace for 70 years.”  Of course, many of the trade concessions during that period were made to bombed-out allies who were struggling against communist aggression and needing an economic boost.  And far too many have failed to recognize that the Cold War is long over and these countries have grown wealthy and are no longer in need of American largesse.

Trump stuck to his guns: He wanted tariffs, and he would get them.  “What about the empty factories?” Trump kept asking.  Manufacturing jobs also are essential to the “Deplorables” who put Trump in the Oval Office.  Such occupations generally command much higher paychecks than service jobs, allowing the breadwinner to support his family on one income.  And they don’t require a degree from a Cultural Marxist university or mountains of debt in the form of student loans.

On June 1, 2016, President Obama prophesied that manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back.”  He joked that candidate Trump didn’t hold a “magic wand” to negotiate better trade deals.

Thus it is no surprise that, in Obama’s last two full years in office, 2015-16, according to U.S. Labor Department statistics, 55,000 manufacturing jobs were created.  But in Trump’s first 21 months in office, there were 396,000 new manufacturing jobs.  “The Trump administration’s policies have ignited a manufacturing boom,” wrote Chuck DeVore in Investor’s Business Daily, also noting that a healthy manufacturing sector is crucial to the maintenance of a strong national defense.

Hard-working middle-class Americans are finally getting a break.  Silicon Valley certainly got what it wanted in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which ended up creating monopolies among the Tech Left—trillion-dollar-equity giants that grab huge profits from pornography and leftist propaganda while censoring conservative Trump supporters.

Immigration also looms large in Fear.  Cohn, a New York Democrat, insisted, “We’ve got to continue to have open borders. . . . We have many jobs in this country that Americans won’t do.”  Woodward adds, “The employment picture was so favorable that the United States would run out of workers soon.”  How is it, then, that South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and other major U.S. competitors thrive with close to no immigration?

The lack-of-workers argument is specious.  Scarcity causes prices to go up; a scarcity of labor means higher wages for workers.  Industry big shots hate that, but regular Americans love it.  Moreover, a concern neglected by Woodward and the rest of the media is the low American birthrate—the lowest ever—which is below replacement levels, with illegitimate births at 40 percent, another record.  At root, this is  a moral and spiritual problem.  However, as history has shown, higher incomes encourage a stronger birthrate, which means (among other things) more workers in the long run.  A higher wage also makes it easier to afford to get married before having babies.

To be fair, Cohn and the others did design decent tax cuts.  But what good is that to regular Americans if their wages continue to stagnate because of open borders and bad trade policies?

Then there are the wars Trump inherited.  Early on, he dressed down his generals: “I’ve been hearing . . . this nonsense about Afghanistan for 17 years with no success. . . . The soldiers on the ground could run things much better than you.  I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”

Tillerson objected: “Look, you can’t think of Afghanistan in isolation.  You’ve got to think of it in a regional context.”

“But how many more deaths,” Trump insisted.  “How many more lost limbs?  How much longer are we going to be there?”  Woodward noticed the President was practically quoting Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind.”

As he promised during his campaign, Trump has been more aggressive than Obama with regard to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  When he was being interviewed for secretary of defense, Gen. James Mattis “looked directly at Trump” and insisted, “We need to change what we are doing.  It can’t be a war of attrition.  It must be a war of annihilation.”

According to Woodward, “Trump loved the concept.  Perfect.”

Soon that’s what happened.  ISIS made the mistake of transforming itself from an elusive terrorist organization to a “state,” taking control of cities and exposing itself to more conventional warfare.  Taking advantage of that exposure, Trump demonstrated that he could use force decisively and successfully.

Woodward says Trump “doesn’t understand the basics.”  Apparently for Woodward and other men of the Beltway, understanding “the basics” means repeating the patterns of the Establishment that have yielded pointless foreign entanglements and destructive domestic policies.

If there’s a particular fault one might find with Trump after reading Fear, it’s that he hasn’t followed his instincts often enough.  His advisors and generals too often talk him out of the common-sense policies on which he campaigned.  Woodward is squeamish about the turnover of personnel within the Trump administration.  But given Trump’s successes thus far despite opposition from subordinates at nearly every turn, perhaps he should make more, not less, use of the phrase he made popular on television: “You’re fired.”

 

[Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward (New York: Simon & Schuster) 448 pp., $30.00]