2. Woodward is best seen as the ne plus ultra of access journalism elevating the form away from daily journalism into a kind of court history. Like all court historians, he relies on the gossip of courtiers. This has some value, but courtiers tend to be self-serving.
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3. It's usually fairly easy to figure out which courtiers Woodward is relying on: they tend to be the ones who are shown in a heroic light as the pivots of momentous events. In Fear, Rob Porter & Gary Cohn allegedly saved us from Trump's worst instincts.
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4. The self-serving account of courtiers adds some color to the historical record, but it misses the big events: it's business history informed by office gossip rather than economics. In the case of Trump, what Woodward tells nothing about how GOP enabled Trump.
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5. The Milley revelations have raised cries of coups and treason. But reading between the lines, it looks like Milley stayed within the book. To the extent he played any uncomfortably outsized role it was due to Trump's incompetence and (more crucially) congressional dereliction
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6. The big story is institutional: GOP elite going all in for Trump, rendering moot all constitutional remedies (impeachment, 25th Amendment), offloading check duties on military. Woodward's methods don't allow for this story to be told.https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/coup-and-countercoup?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twitter …
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Right, but as you admit it’s all hearsay so why even believe the color?
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