According to this article on Woodward's new book, Trump's White House barely survives from one day to the next. He doesn't care to govern. He's a horrible manager. He routinely ignores the expertise of his own people, and often aggressively insults them unnecessarily. He's so moody and lazy that his own hand-picked staff often cut him out of the decision-making, going so far as to covertly remove papers from his desk that they don't want him to look at or sign.
If there's any silver lining to this mess, it's that this administration may be so bad that the country finally wakes up to some of its worst problems. Trump's authoritarianism is what we get for decades of slowly growing elite corruption and failure that have eroded our democracy.
The book’s title is derived from a remark that then-candidate Trump made in an interview with Woodward and Post political reporter Robert Costa in 2016. Trump said, “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, ‘Fear.’ ”
A central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation he was elected to lead.
Woodward describes “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them.
Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.