Bob Woodward’s New Book On Donald Trump Shows A Frightening Lack Of Empathy And Human Emotion
With Bob Woodward’s new book Fear: Trump in the White House now on store shelves everywhere, the reporting technique that Woodward and Carl Bernstein mastered during the Watergate scandal has been used to give readers a certain portrait of Donald Trump. The tell-all has revealed what many are calling a frightening lack of empathy and human emotion on the part of the current president.
As Salon reports, during his election campaign Donald Trump spoke of himself as a decent person who truly believes that he is doing things for the right reasons, explaining, “I like to be good. I don’t like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad.”
However, when it comes to the itinerary of questionable things that Trump has done — the list is rather long and varied. Over the years he has poked fun at a journalist who was disabled, suggested women were too fat or ugly, and commented that certain African-American women have notably low IQs, Salon claims.
On the subject of apologizing, it appears that this is an action is something that Donald Trump is not particularly known for. Bob Woodward recalled that the president once told White House staff secretary Rob Porter that apologizing for Nazi marches was a huge mistake on his part.
“That was the biggest f—ing mistake I’ve made. You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”
.@realDonaldTrump First Lady Melania Trump greet supporters as they arrive in Johnstown, PA to attend the Flight 93 September 11 Memorial Service in Shanksville, PA pic.twitter.com/SRMBvlDLKJ
— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) September 11, 2018
According to The Washington Post, Donald Trump first responded to 9/11 by suggesting that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan after the Twin Towers fell. Whether he was attempting to be poetic or simply being inconsiderate of the attendant loss of life posed by the tragedy is unclear.
“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest — and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”
Now that that so many residents of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia are busy evacuating before Hurricane Florence strikes at the end of the week, Trump took the opportunity today to speak about the marvelous job that had been done in Texas and Florida with regards to hurricane relief efforts.
But after the president also mentioned Puerto Rico, he couldn’t help but take aim at the Mayor of San Juan — calling United States relief efforts unappreciated and blaming their poor energy infrastructure for the relative failure of aid packages offered during the earlier crisis.
We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2018
After taking into account the many similarities between Donald Trump and former President Richard Nixon, Bob Woodward has concluded that perhaps one of their most prominent shared traits — and the thing that they will most be remembered for — is the utter lack of empathy that both presidents felt toward those that opposed them.
