BOB WOODWARD
“May be the best reporter of all time.”
- Bob Schieffer, CBS News
Rage is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest.
Woodward, the #1 international bestselling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes readers into the Oval Office as Trump’s head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans.
In 18 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months—an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind—the president provides a self-portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the “dynamite behind every door.”
At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president.
Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making.
Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents.
Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film.”
Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. Okay?” Trump told the author in July. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get to do another book. You’ll find I was right.”
Rage sold 600,000 copies during its first week on sale in the U.S. and is on a trajectory to be the best-selling work of investigative journalism published in 2020.
Praise for Rage
“Trump is the first candidate for president to launch an October surprise against himself. It’s as if Nixon sent the Nixon tapes to Woodward in an envelope by FedEx.”
— Nick Confessore of the New York Times
“We’ve had 45 presidents of the United States and we have had exactly one Bob Woodward. …He has written about nine consecutive presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump.…Bob Woodward delivers the verdict of the first draft of history.”
— Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC
“Even in a news landscape where it feels like nothing is shocking anymore, the first excerpts from the new Bob Woodward book still landed like a pair of hydrogen bombs.”
— Vanity Fair
“[T]his revealing look at an embattled presidency facing a pandemic, racial unrest and a suffering economy…the book’s details have been explosive.”
— USA Today
“Woodward’s prose offers readers that delicious, vicarious sense of being an insider, right there in the room with Bob, a witness to presidential sulks and boasts.”
— Rosa Brooks, Washington Post
“Over nearly a half-century, no other person—including people wielding official power as legislators or prosecutors—has done as much to illuminate the modern presidency and help shape understanding of the nine people to hold the office during his career as Woodward, wielding only a journalist’s unofficial powers of curiosity, notepad, and recorder”
— John F. Harris, Politico
Rage is available for purchase at:
Finding the Real Story Since 1971
Two Pulitzer Prizes. Twenty bestselling books. Fourteen #1 best-sellers:
“Perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history.”
Time Magazine on All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Robert Gates, former director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, said in 2014 that he wished he'd recruited Woodward into the CIA:
“He has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill [their] guts to him…his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn’t be talking about is just extraordinary and may be unique.”
