Woodward’s stock-in-trade is the heavily ‘reported’, privileged-access, semi-official version of events, halfway between journalism and history, in which everyone gets their say, usually on a non-attribution ‘deep background’ basis. He departed from that slightly for Fear (2018), his account of the first half of Trump’s term, because Trump would not speak to him. He departs from it here, too, because Trump does.

Rage becomes an uneasy mix of classic Woodward, in which the state’s flawed but noble servants wrestle with events and nobody comes off too badly, and new-formula Woodward, as the journalist sits through seventeen ‘interviews’ in which Trump rambles disconnectedly about obsessions that sometimes do not last the duration of a sentence.

Donald Trump fields questions regarding comments he made to Bob Woodward that downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, 10 September 2020 (Michael Reynolds/Newscom/Alamy)

The first half is mainly Jim Mattis (former secretary of defense), Rex Tillerson (former secretary of state), and Dan Coats (former director of national intelligence) experiencing the ‘almost irresistible call to presidential service’ and living to regret it, ground already thoroughly traversed by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig in A Very Stable Genius (2020). In the second half, Woodward is mainly just a dutiful stenographer, occasionally remarking on the ‘vague, directionless nature of Trump’s comments’, the ‘maddening, convoluted dodging’, the ‘stream-of-consciousness grievance’, the ‘rambling, repetitious, often defensive and angry monologues’.

Which, to be sure, they are, but they are nothing we have not heard before. Yes, prepare to be amazed. Trump unplugged sounds almost exactly the same as Trump plugged: scatterbrained, grandiose, self-pitying, a fashioner of sentences that collapse under the weight of their incoherence if they extend beyond five words, two of which will usually be ‘tremendous’ or ‘unbelievable’. In listening so attentively, however, Woodward fails to hear something integral to Trump’s appeal.

Not for Trump the self-protecting cloak of ‘deep background’. He rings Woodward at all hours of the day and night, and either brags (‘Here’s the thing: I’m never wrong’; ‘You know they talk about the élite. Really, the élite. Ah, they have nice houses. No. I have much better than them. I have better everything than them, including education’) or bitches (‘I have done a tremendous amount for the Black community. And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love’; ‘I have opposition like nobody has. And that’s okay. I’ve had that all my life’). Sure, Trump’s brain is a garbage fire. But even a garbage fire supplies warmth.

Trump is a phony all right: the heir to a fortune who might as well have invested it in government bonds for all his commercial acumen, but who nonetheless poses as a business genius; the self-styled strongman who prevaricates and postures rather than makes actual decisions; the self-professed drainer of the swamp who has simply merged it with his own swamp of overt and covert self-dealing. But the act is defiantly real, which to many makes him a refreshing antidote to decades of manipulation by machine politics and dirty dynasties (Bush, Clinton et al.). Every now and again, there’s some cluster-fiasco – a bald-faced lie, a crude betrayal, a blown whistle, a legal snafu. Yet it blows over, or is dislodged by the next scandal du jour. Trump carries on like nothing has changed, and the impression is: he’s indestructible, he’s our guy.

This never seems to dawn on Woodward, who keeps straining to interpret Trump by the light of previous presidents. He tries fact checking, such as his earnest annotation when Trump invokes Antifa: ‘Antifa, an abbreviation for “Anti-fascist”, is a decentralised movement. It is not an organisation and does not have a leader or membership dues.’ He tries introducing concepts like ‘white privilege’, which simply cause Trump to laugh: ‘You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you.’ He tries pleading with Trump to pivot, to come up with a vision or a plan, even offering the president his own Woodrow Wilsonesque fourteen-point list of Covid policy objectives, which merely elicits Trump’s condescension: ‘I’m glad you told me.’

Rage comes with a citation from the venerable Robert Caro calling Woodward a ‘great reporter’ who has ‘never stopped seeking out facts’. But finding that facts here have no purchase, Woodward is reduced to pointless imprecations: ‘It’s a matter of the heart and the spirit.’ Trump comes back, quite rightly, with: ‘You don’t understand me.’ At last, Woodward sags: ‘We were speaking past each other, almost from different universes.’

It is incidental comments in Rage that are most incisive. Of Trump’s relationship with truth, Coats says: ‘To him a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks.’ Of Trump’s objectives, Covid guru Anthony Fauci observes: ‘His sole purpose is to get re-elected.’ Of Trump’s party, his creepily cynical son-in-law Jared Kushner observes: ‘The Republican Party was a collection of tribes.’ Trump, argues Kushner, has galvanised them: ‘I don’t think it’s even about the issues. I think it’s about the attitude.’ In which case, what price political journalism, except as just another alternative in the market of attitudes?

Emerson spoke of democracy as being ‘a government of bullies tempered by editors’. But the message of Rage is that we are well past that stage, and that after penning twenty books Woodward is just another voice persuasive to no one not already persuaded, and that a president widely acknowledged to be an incompetent and ill-informed monomaniac who has subverted every democratic and institutional norm he has touched stands every chance of re-election in November. In which case, what would become impossible is dystopian fiction.