Fear is the establishment's answer to Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury. Where Wolff is a gossip rag arsonist who relied heavily on Steve Bannon's version of events, Bob Woodward is, well, he's Woodward. He took down Nixon and has written books on every subsequent president. Fear relies on hundreds of hours of transcribed interviews on deep background, and reading between the lines its easy to huess his sources are mostly "responsible adults" who have left the administration: Priebus, Porter, Cohn, Tillerson, Dowd, and Senator Lindsey Graham. The picture he paints of Trump is less salacious, but no less damning.

According to these men, who were once close to Trump and who have fallen from grace, the president is an idiot, a rage-filled child, a reckless gambler, a lazy slob addicted to cable news, a bullying narcissist, and an inveterate liar. If there is any fixed star in Trump's universe, it's that if you're not screwing someone, you're being screwed.

Woodward covers the first year or so of Trump's presidency, focusing on the intrigue around the oval office, and the seesawing attempts to find a strategy on Afghanistan, North Korea, and trade. The results are either wise men restraining the worst impulses of a mad king, or an administrative coup by the Deep State, depending on how you feel. The book opens with Gary Cohn stealing a memo off Trump's desk to prevent him from blowing up a vital US-Korea trade agreement, which is probably the most dramatic example, but again and again, his aides have to reign in Trump's emotionally driven decisions, ranging from declaring victory in Afghanistan and turning it over to Erik Prince and the mercenary army formerly known as Blackwater, starting a nuclear war with North Korea, or demolishing the post-1945 consensus on free trade, no matter the cost. Of course, these men are not some Obama-holdover Deep State. They're men Trump appointed, praised, and mostly refused to fire. Despite that idiotic anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, they are not the resistance inside the administration. They are Trump's instruments, and his dishonor stains them.

The revolving door outside the Oval Office is interesting, but Woodward doesn't have much to say about the things that really matter about Trump. How much racism comes from him, and how much from ethnonationalist ghouls like Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller? The Mueller investigation drives Trump crazy, but is there fire beneath all the smoke? What of the real harms that dismantling the 'administrative state' of EPA regulations, educational standards, and SNAP assistance brings? What about the judges? How about the dead of Hurricane Maria? The utter nonsense spewed at ongoing campaign rallies? What is up with Jared Kushner? Is there, contrary to all the evidence, any actual depth to the man?

The only humanizing touch is that Trump refuses to meet with the families of soldiers killed in his military adventures. I can understand that moral cowardice. I'm not sure how any ostensible patriot can square that cowardice with their support of the man.

Woodward's book doesn't reveal any deep truths. We all knew Trump was incompetent, incapable of empathy or foresight, the meanest creature to ever occupy the White House. What it does reveal, in chilling clinical detail, is how bad the situation really is.