Over the years, I have been more than willing to share my opinion of Donald J. Trump, who I had hoped would just fade from the US political scene. That was a strategy suggested at the very beginning eight years ago: “Just ignore him and he’ll go away.” A narcissist’s worst nightmare. 

However, that strategy failed badly.

Trump’s contribution to U.S. discord, mayhem, and general chaos is a perfect example of where that childish impulse takes all of us, and how rapidly political discourse can deteriorate.

When Bob Woodward published Fear: Trump in the White House back in 2018, it was well received and reviewed. The title came from a March 2016 interview with Trump in which he stated: “Real power is–I don’t even want to use the word–Fear.” 

The initial volume in a trilogy, it covers the first two years of the Trump Presidency and lifts the curtain on how crazy things got and how close the U.S. came to a major conflict with North Korea. 

One line in Fear is memorable for the way it summarizes Trump’s Presidency: “It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisors…are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”

The straw that broke the camel’s back came with Trump’s commentary on the Charlottesville White Supremacist Rally, when he said “you had people that were very fine people on both sides.”Woodward observes that from that moment, “There was a more hostile relationship with the media. The culture wars were reinvigorated. There was a racist tinge. Trump accelerated it…The fire was going to burn, and it was going to burn brightly.”

The second volume of Woodward’s series, Rage, unlike the first book, is based on seventeen interviews with Trump by Woodward. It was published in 2020, during the Pandemic. 

The one-word title comes from a quote from the President on March 31^st, 2016: “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do.” Obviously, a revealing self-reflection.

The most important and surprisingly candid revelations in the book come not from Donald Trump, but from his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Woodward looks for “reflectors” of his subject who know the person intimately. He hit the motherlode with Kushner, who was exceptionally frank and offered four recommendations to better understand Donald Trump: 

1) Read 2018 Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan, in which she states: “He’s crazy … and it’s kind of working … epic instability, mismanagement and confusion … an unhinged or not-fully-hinged quality that feels like a screwball tragedy.”

2) Compare Trump to the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, who suggests: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” 

3) Read Chris Whipple’s 2018 book The Gatekeepers about White House Chiefs of Staff and how they control access to the Oval Office. Whipple wrote that Trump, “clearly had no idea how to govern … and almost a year into his presidency, Trump will be Trump, no matter his chief of staff.”

4) Read Scott Adam’s book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, explains that Trump’s misstatements of fact are not errors, but “intentional wrongness persuasion.” Trump’s base believes that every word he speaks is the truth, as disseminated now via the Truth Social online platform. Radio created Hitler, but social media and reality TV gave birth to Trump.

Kushner hit the nail on the head when he said understanding Trump meant understanding Alice in Wonderland. The Queen of Heart’s rage is not far removed from that of  Donald Trump and that infamous line “You’re fired!” (on The Apprentice)—if only a little more civil than “Off with their heads.” 

These political cartoons say it all.

The final installment in the Woodward Trump library is Peril, written with co-author Robert Costa and published in September 2021. The title comes not from Trump, but U.S. President Joe Biden, at his January 2021 inaugural address, when the new President said, “We have much to do in this winter of peril.” 

Peril starts with a description of the aftermath following the U. S. Capitol insurrection. Here again, the revelations come from a different source— Congressman Adam Smith—who flew back from Washington to Seattle on the day after the insurrection with a plane load of MAGA-hat-wearing ReTrumplicans.

 Smith describes the white supremacist and anti-Semitic laced conversations taking place all around him. The Congressman sees Trump as “a hundred-year flood in American democracy.” He summarizes his observations about Trump by declaring, “The focus needs to be making sure that we don’t let a lunatic back into the White House … Trump is mentally unstable. He’s a narcissistic psychopath. The great fear was that he would use the Pentagon and the Department of Defense basically to stage a coup.”

Woodward and Costa’s final paragraph sends a chill up my spine as they project into the future: “But we also saw darkness. He could be petty. Cruel. Bored by American history and dismissive of governing traditions that had long guided elected leaders. Tantalized by the prospect of power…Could Trump work his will again? Were there limits to what he and his supporters might do to put him back in power. Peril remains…” 

An unsettling conclusion, given the present potential of a second Trump Presidency.