Fear: Trump in the White House
With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump's White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence. Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president's first years in office.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2025–2026years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Bob Woodward's book Fear: Trump in the White House made it pretty clear that Trump (in his first term) either did not understand how trade works between countries or did not care. At the time he was singularly focused on "trade deficits," especially the one between the US and South Korea, because on paper it seemed like the US was "losing" or "being taken advantage of" by South Korea. That was all he cared about, reducing that trade deficit so the US came out on top.
- Excerpt from Fear: Trump in the White House
> "Why don't we manufacture things at home?" Lindsey asked. "We're a manufacturing country."
> Of course the United States manufactured things, but reality did not match the vision in Trump's mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America—locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.
> Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories.
> Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn't care.
> "Mr. President, can I show this to you?" Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. "See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing."
> "I don't get it," Trump said.
> Cohn tried to explain: "I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?"
> Cohn added, "People don't want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don't want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they're going to choose something else."
> Trump wasn't buying it.
> Several times Cohn just asked the president, "Why do you have these views?"
> "I just do," Trump replied. "I've had these views for 30 years."
> "That doesn't mean they're right," Cohn said. "I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn't mean I was right."
The thing that motivates these viewpoints is that "other people" need to build character.
