He added: “I just think too many people have lost their perspective and become emotionally unhinged about Trump. There’s documents, there’s notes, there’s not just the phrase but there’s they sat and they met and this is what happened. Woodward reflected: “I look at my job as: let’s present the rock solid evidence of what happens. Trump has dismissed the book, already in the top of Amazon’s bestsellers of 2018 list, as “a piece of fiction” and used Twitter to brand Woodward “a liar”. As the 20-month-old Trump presidency already becomes the stuff of history books, Woodward’s contribution carries more weight than the gossipy and sometimes sloppy Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff or the score-settling of Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged. Nearly all his interviews were taped one ran to 820 pages of transcript he interviewed one subject nine times. His body of evidence, charting how decisions get made or don’t in a jaw-droppingly dysfunctional White House, is a welcome antidote to the daily blizzard of online agitprop, rumours and conspiracy theories.īob Woodward at Trump Tower in New York in January 2017. He has no need to shout it from the rooftops because the facts are staring us in the face. Instead, in Fear, he meticulously builds a case against Trump’s fitness for office. In an era when the line between news and opinion is increasingly blurred, when even Bernstein offers punditry on CNN, Woodward is perhaps not in his natural habitat touring the TV, radio and podcasting studios being asked to serve up polemical soundbites with viral potential. He still champions shoe-leather journalism and knocking on doors, sometimes late at night, and is not likely to be found dropping snarky comments on Twitter.Ī newsman of the old school, he evidently likes to let his reporting do the talking. Woodward came of age in an era of clattering typewriters, cigarette smoke, hot metal, thundering presses and covert calls made from coin-hungry payphones. Bob Woodward, right, and Carl Bernstein in the newsroom of the Washington Post in 1973.

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