"Woodward tells us — but they too remained silent.

And so, for the most part, does Woodward himself. His scoops derive from his ability to convince people who should know better that he’s really on their side; it’s a journalistic technique that requires the reporter to flatter rather than challenge.

At times, he even seems to slip from obsequiousness into the role of mentor: listening to Trump’s justifications for his request that the Ukrainian president launch an investigation of Joe Biden, for instance, Woodward pauses his questions to offer Trump some unsolicited advice. “I’m going to tell you something from my experience,” he says. “I’m telling you, from too many decades of experience in cases like this, if you apologized it would go away.” Trump naturally ignores this guidance, but the reader can’t help but wonder: Why is a journalist giving political counsel to the subject of his reporting?

Later, in another bizarre exchange, Woodward urges Trump to display a tad more empathy toward racial justice protesters. (The president, true to form, has been exulting in his ability “to send in the military” to deal with the protesters, whom he describes, variously, as “these poor radical lefts” and as “arsonists . . . thugs . . . anarchists” and “very bad people.”) Woodward, in response, attempts to explain “White privilege” to an incredulous Trump. “Do you have any sense that that privilege has isolated ?” the reporter asks. “And that we have to work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel?”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/woodwards-rage-is-a-damning-account-of-trumps-cowering-sycophants-and-enablers/2020/09/10/dab8917a-f2d6-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html