Fear: Trump in the White House was published by Simon & Schuster in September 2018 and became an immediate bestseller, selling over a million copies in its first week. The title comes from a remark Trump made to Woodward during the 2016 campaign: “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”
Woodward applies his established method — deep background interviews, narrative reconstruction, granular detail — to the Trump White House, and the result is a portrait of administrative dysfunction without precedent in the modern presidency. Senior aides, including Gary Cohn (Director of the National Economic Council) and Rob Porter (Staff Secretary), describe removing documents from the Resolute Desk to prevent Trump from signing orders that they believed would damage national security or the economy. The characterization suggests a presidency in which the staff’s primary function is not to implement the president’s agenda but to prevent him from acting on his impulses.
The book is structured around a series of decision points — the response to Charlottesville, the approach to North Korea, trade policy with China, the border wall — and in each case, Woodward presents the internal debate among advisors and the president’s interventions, which are portrayed as impulsive, uninformed, and frequently reversed. The portrait is not flattering, and Trump’s response — that Woodward was a “liar” writing “fiction” — became a familiar pattern for the subsequent books.
Collecting Fear
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2018): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$15
- Signed: $50–$150
The enormous first printing makes unsigned copies common and inexpensive.