Woodward, who has been covering U.S. presidents for the last 50 years, offers two books in one here. The first picks up where Fear (2018), his chronicle of the first years of the Trump presidency, left off. It details the personal journeys of those who got off the Trump train, particularly Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, and James Mattis, secretary of defense, commonly known as the grownups in the room, or "overconfident idiots," as Jared Kushner calls them, happily noting they're gone. Woodward paints sympathetic pictures of both Coats and Mattis, who were clearly unattributed sources, detailing how Coats agonized over some of the president's actions and Mattis prayed at the National Cathedral's War Memorial as he contemplated war with North Korea. The second half of the book details the 17 taped conversations Woodward conducted with Trump, before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Although the headlines from the book have already been blared across the media, especially the president's early knowledge of the virus' severity, many of the conversations are notable for their banality, touched with brutality (Trump's appreciation for strongmen like Turkish leader Recep Edergon and North Korea's Kim Jong-un) and sprinkled with a heavy layer of déjà vu. Anyone who has watched a Trump press conference will be familiar with the president's refusals to directly answer questions, his misdirection, and the set pieces he has repeated dozens of times. Here, readers are treated again to the story of Trump's genius uncle, John G. Trump, a professor at MIT, whose big brain was somehow transferred to Trump "genetically." Woodward, who does fact-check many of Trump's answers in the text, often seems as helpless as a newspaper newbie, attempting to follow the president's rambling train of thought, or trying to get him to focus on important issues or stick to a topic. In the past, Woodward has usually let his conclusions come out through his narrative. Here, he ends the book definitively in his epilogue. Looking at the presidential performance in its entirety, Woodward boils it down to one sentence: "Trump is the wrong man for the job."

That thing in the air that is deadlier than even your "strenuous flus"? Trump knew--and did nothing about it. The big news from veteran reporter Woodward's follow-up to Fear has been widely reported: Trump was fully aware at the beginning of 2020 that a pandemic loomed and chose to downplay it, causing an untold number of deaths and crippling the economy. His excuse that he didn't want to cause a panic doesn't fly given that he trades in fear and division. The underlying news, however, is that Trump participated in this book, unlike in the first, convinced by Lindsey Graham that Woodward would give him a fair shake. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they "had made a political survival decision" to do so--and surrendered their party to him. The narrative often requires reading between the lines. Graham, though a byword for toadyism, often reins Trump in; Jared Kushner emerges as the real power in the West Wing, "highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments"; Trump admires tyrants, longs for their unbridled power, resents the law and those who enforce it, and is quick to betray even his closest advisers; and, of course, Trump is beholden to Putin. Trump occasionally emerges as modestly self-aware, but throughout the narrative, he is in a rage. Though he participated, he said that he suspected this to be "a lousy book." It's not--though readers may wish Woodward had aired some of this information earlier, when more could have been done to stem the pandemic. When promoting Fear, the author was asked for his assessment of Trump. His reply: "Let's hope to God we don't have a crisis." Multiple crises later, Woodward concludes, as many observers have, "Trump is the wrong man for the job." An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.