President Trump’s Labor Day tweet about Attorney General Jeff Sessions is even more atrocious than usual, columnist David Ignatius says. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Today Bob Woodward’s book gets released, and much coverage of it is framed around revelations of President Trump’s raging, volatile temperament, his erratic mind-changing, and his startling lack of knowledge or curiosity about complex domestic and global policy problems.
In this framing, the alleged “adults in the room” wage a daily struggle against all these terrible traits. A portrait emerges of a man who is mentally and intellectually unfit to serve as president — the top-line revelation that has been widely discussed for days now.
But there are other key revelations in “Fear” that illuminate a different set of traits — Trump’s nonstop lying, his utter contempt for legal and governing process, and his bottomless bad faith in developing rationales for extremely consequential decisions. These sorts of traits — unlike Trump’s temperament and incuriosity — are not usually looked at as evidence of his unfitness for this office. But they should be.