By John Pickard, Brentwood Labour Party
Those whom the gods would destroy, the first make mad. It has long been acknowledged by Marxists that one of the classical symptoms of a society hurtling towards revolutionary upheaval is an unbridgeable split in the ruling class. Fear, by Bob Woodward, describes perfectly such a split. And not only a split, but chaos, volatility and irreconcilable differences in the political representatives of American capitalism.
Bob Woodward is an associate editor of the Washington Post and a double Pulitzer Prize winner, most notably for his exposure, with Carl Bernstein, of what became the Watergate scandal in 1972. It could be argued that no two people contributed more to the resignation of President Richard Nixon than these journalists.
Fear is Woodward’s latest book, drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews with direct participants in discussions and meetings around the presidential election campaign of Donald Trump and during his first year in the White House. The book is no critique of US capitalism as such, or its imperialist policies towards other states around the world. In that sense, Trump is only a continuation of what came before: Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. It is not a book written at all from a socialist perspective. But it is nonetheless a remarkable description of the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy at the highest level of society and it is an indication of the degeneracy of the political representatives of a degenerate system.
Whims and caprices of an unstable president
The whole book paints a picture of confusion and panic among Trump’s closest advisers, as they scramble day by day to control the idiotic whims and caprices of a president motivated more by Fox News than any understandable set of principles. One after another his principle advisers come to the conclusion that the president is hopelessly and incorrigibly unstable.
Trump’s closest advisers even took to removing documents from his desk before he signed them – in the expectation that he would forget about them and not go back to them. For example, Trump decided one day that he wanted to pull the US out of KORUS – the security and trade agreement between South Korea and the USA – because of the huge trade imbalance between the two states. His top military advisers – and he had a lot of them in key positions – explained to Trump that KORUS was not just on trade but it was a vital security deal, allowing tens of thousands of American troops on the Korean peninsular and the stationing of listening posts and missile trackers close to North Korea and China. Trump didn’t care, he wanted an order to sign, to pull out of KORUS. So his aides kept drawing up the order and his ‘advisers’ kept stealing it off his desk. For months on end the president didn’t notice and kept raising the issue and forgetting it all over again.
“Trump’s lack of basic understanding”
Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs and at that time the top economic adviser, was the person who admitted ‘lifting’ the memoranda on KORUS. According to Woodward, Cohn later admitted that he was “astounded at Trump’s lack of basic understanding.” In the first year of the Trump presidency, the key battleground between his advisers was on the issue of free trade or tariffs. The two factions were constantly at war with one another. According to Woodward (via the staff secretary) Cohn “had amassed a large power base in the West Wing and his two top aides on trade…are skilled political operatives fundamentally opposed to the Trump trade agenda.”
Against this faction, Trump had brought in a group of protectionists, favouring tariffs. Peter Navarro [Harvard economist] “identified those fighting against the ‘Cohn headwinds’ as Bannon, Stephen Miller, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and himself”. Despite some of these figures leaving the White House since – notably Steve Bannon – we now know that the protectionists eventually came out on top.
Complicating matters even more for Trump’s team was the constant interference of Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Neither had any official position, but they had offices in the West Wing and constantly dropped into meetings to which they had never been invited, forever putting in their pennyworth. Rex Tillerson, at that time Secretary of State, was reported to have said, “The White House is such a disaster. So many of those guys upstairs, they just don’t have a clue what’s going on.” He later resigned his post, but not before he was quoted as having called Trump a “fucking moron”.
“We’re in crazytown” – Trump’s chief of staff
Donald Trump’s statements after the incidents at Charlottesville were particularly disturbing to White House staff. White supremacists had been opposed by a demonstration and after one of the counter-demonstrators was killed by having a car driven at her, Trump attempted to blame “both sides”, as if there was an equivalence between white racists and those opposed to them. After Trump’s third message on the subject, David Duke, the well-known former leader of the Ku Klux Klan tweeted, “Thank you President Trump for your honest & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville”.
But every one of Trump’s top military staff were horrified by his stance. The Chief of Naval Operations, the Marine Corps Commandant, the Chief of Staff of the Army and the heads of the Air Force and the National Guard – all of them, independently of one another, issued statements against racism and intolerance, as open rebukes to their overall ‘commander-in-chief’. Hardly surprising, given that 40 per cent of US military personal are of black or Hispanic heritage.
There are too many issues – the Mueller inquiry, Afghanistan, the Middle East, etc – to detail here. Suffice to say that in the White House confusion and contradictions were everywhere. There was no process, no following protocols, no guiding principles or directions. Everything revolved around the whims and caprices of a man whose attention span was that of a child and whose main source of all information was the television he watches for hours every day. The then chief of staff of the White House, General John Kelly, tried in vain to establish some semblance of order. Eventually, he too left the West Wing. In a small group in his office one day, Kelly said of Trump, “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless trying to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve every had.”
This book is definitely worth a read – but wait until it comes out in paperback. It is also worth reading the novel, To Kill the President by Sam Bourne. Bourne’s book, of course, is fiction, unlike Bob Woodward’s, but they are based on exactly the same scenario – an unpredictable loose cannon in the White House.
February 21, 2019
