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Another big Woodward reveal: Trump’s bottomless bad faith and nonstop lying

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.

View the complete commentary by Greg Sargent was posted on the Washington Post website September 11, 2018 here.

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