It took me a couple of weeks to read Bob Woodward’s first book about the Trump reign, Fear. Granted, Woodward’s books about the various presidencies and such are slower and more in-depth reads than the average summer beach read or your roomnate’s manga collection. But I’m a very fast reader, and in between job and family responsibillities, it took me about twelve days to get to the final page.
Trump says he read Woodward’s second book on his administration, Rage, in a single night. All 466 pages of it. He said:
I actually got to read it last night. I read it very quickly and it was very boring.
No, he didn’t.
Trump wouldn’t have read a 20-page Richie Rich comic book in a single night. Trump doesn’t read. His advisors have boiled down the daily intelligence briefing to a single note card with three bullet points — and he doesn’t read the third bullet point.
Woodward's new book is 480 pages.
Trump, according to former NSC staffers, had trouble making it through a *single* notecard that distilled the day's most pressing issues into three separate bullet points. https://t.co/hn3GM2u5dQ
— Breanne Deppisch (@breanne_dep) September 15, 2020
And don’t think Trump has just recently lost his taste for the written word. As Jonathan Chait writes for the New Yorker:
One interview more than 30 years ago tried to pin him down on a book he has read, and after trying to say he reread his own book, Trump claimed to have read the book his hosts had just named for him, but then was unable to say anything about the book, including its title, other than that the author “did a great job.”
He should probably turn a few pages in Woodward’s latest book. He might be interested to know what we already know:
- he deliberately and systematically lied about the pandemic, directly causing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans;
- how easily Kim Jong Un used flattery to turn Trump into his sycophant;
- the boundless depths of his insecurity, to the point where he hired an actor to portray Obama so he could berate and then “fire” him on camera;
- what a fucking racist he is.
Woodward concludes, “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
My conclusion: Ya think, Bobby boy? In his review of Rage, Slate columnist Fred Kaplan writes of Woodward:
He’s an unparalleled amasser of secret documents, inside facts, dazzling scoops. But he’s also a prisoner of those scoops. He doesn’t quite know what to do with them. He fastidiously counts all the rings on the fallen trees, but doesn’t look closely at the forest or why the trees fell.
That’s okay. We can do that for him. We can judge him, kick him out of office, and hold him accountable for the crimes against humanity he and his administration have committed (and are stil committing).
You go back to watching Fox News hosts slather saliva on your ass, Donnie. We got this from here.
To be fair, his lips probably get tired.
It’s hard to read through those crayon drawings.
(Questions for future interview: Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?)
To be fair, I wonder how many people actually remember learning to read. I don’t, even though I remember the teacher who taught me to read, but I don’t remember anything about the process of learning to read at all. I asked my kids. they don’t remember either. It feels as if we have always known how to read.
In response to Fred Kaplan: Bob Woodward’s a REPORTER, not an Op-Ed scribe.
He sees his job as gathering facts, presenting them in print & allowing those facts to speak for themselves. He does this chosen job very well, working from an assumption that his readership is bright enough to follow the facts to their logical conclusion.
I now wonder if Bernstein did most of the writing on “All the President’s Men”.
Not being snarky, but what do you mean? Woodward has written what now? Nine books on presidents. So?
tRump slept for an hour or two with the book under his pillow and assimilated it by osmosis. He only imagined he was awake and reading it.
Add to list. What are we up to now…25,000 lies? Gotta admit, it’s almost impossible for a person to reach that number in less than 4yrs. Also hard to kill over 200,000 citizens in 9months. Trump is #1 All time in both categories. Good job MAGA maggots!!!